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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
