An uneven mix of reverence and irreverence, scholarship and gossip, but, overall, a bracing informal history. (For...
An intermingling of serious history and chatty anecdotes about the spouses of British prime ministers, conceived by the wife of the current one.
Booth, a lawyer, is married to Tony Blair. A career woman much like Hillary Clinton, Booth had received no training about how to comport herself when thrust into the role of Britain’s first lady seven years ago. “There is no job description for the prime minister’s spouse because there is no job,” Booth comments. She decided to learn how her predecessors had handled their roles, and so she teamed up with journalist Haste to research and write accounts of their lives. Those accounts grew into a book, with each predecessor back to 1955 covered in a separate chapter: Clarissa Eden, Dorothy Macmillan, Elizabeth Home, Mary Wilson, Audrey Callaghan, Denis Thatcher, and Norma Major. Four of the living spouses—Eden, Wilson, Thatcher, and Major—granted interviews. The biographical accounts, meantime, aren’t all whitewash—Dorothy Macmillan’s extramarital affair with Robert Boothby is included—and Booth, further, explores lifestyle and policy disagreements as well as concordances within each marriage. Life inside Number 10 Downing Street (a combination office/home) and Chequers (an Elizabethan manor house about an hour’s drive from the city, used primarily on the weekends) is a mix of work and play, but the emphasis is definitely on work. For those interested in architecture and interior design, Booth describes the alterations in the two residences over the decades, explaining why some of the features are sacrosanct. In her last chapter, she generalizes with insights about the shifting social class of the spouses, the role of religious faith while in a supporting role, the increasing difficulty of protecting family privacy in an era of pervasive media, and the varying ways of wielding political influence behind the scenes.
An uneven mix of reverence and irreverence, scholarship and gossip, but, overall, a bracing informal history. (For comparison, see The Blairs and Their Court, above.)Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7011-7676-8
Page Count: 321
Publisher: Trafalgar Square
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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