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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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