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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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