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 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
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