Well-written and satisfying—to Anglophiles in general, and particularly to the royalty-obsessed.
Drawing on a wealth of ancestral documents, Spencer, the Ninth Earl Spencer and brother of the late Lady Diana, recounts the history of his aristocratic family from his forebear's arrival in England as a courtier to William the Conqueror in 1066 to his sister's marriage to Prince Charles in 1981.
The text begins with the life of the Spencer patriarch who served as steward to William the Conqueror. While the family made their fortunes as sheep farmers in Warwickshire, they always remained keenly active in England's political establishment, serving in both military and political capacities. When the Spencers became united through marriage with the powerful Churchill dynasty, their matriarch Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, expressed her political ambitions by personally arranging marriages for descendents of both families. There's an enormous amount of historical detail here, but the repetitious nature of biographical history on a scale such as this (constant recitations of names, dates of births and deaths, the titles and lineages united by each marriage match) can become muddled and ultimately confusing for the reader. The author's challenge is to adequately mesh fact-listing with an overarching narrative that is both coherent and engaging. In this, Spencer succeeds tolerably well. Though he fails to construct thematic through-lines that would tie the disparate fates of his ancestors together in a way that would be enlightening, Spencer's narrative tone, consistently intimate and sincere, helps provide the cohesive structure such a project so badly needs. The frequent referencing of letters and diaries available to the author also lends a legitimacy to his conclusions, usefully highlighting and emphasizing his points.
Well-written and satisfying—to Anglophiles in general, and particularly to the royalty-obsessed.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26649-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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