And what did the box contain? You’ll need to read this absorbing detective story to find out.
From British journalist Campbell, an intricate, fascinating look at some long-forgotten episodes in the quest by European powers to control India.
In August 1997, the Swiss Bankers Association issued a list naming some 1,800 holders of dormant accounts. Paging through the list on a computer in his newspaper’s office, Campbell’s eye was caught by one of those names: “Duleep Singh, Catherine (Princess), last heard of in 1942 living in Penn, Bucks.” On the hunt for a story, the journalist had the bright idea of creating news by reuniting the Singh family with its inheritance—inasmuch as the original Duleep Singh had given the fabulous Koh-i-Noor diamond to Queen Victoria, it stood to reason that the Swiss safe-deposit box contained jewels, or gold, or at the very least the deed to some rich property. Campbell’s quest took him down dozens of blind alleys, each knee-deep in red herrings, always leading back to the mysterious Maharajah Duleep Singh, “last king of the Sikhs,” who lived out his days in the second half of the 19th century as an exile in the Suffolk countryside, having lost his beloved Punjab through a combination of his own perfidy and England’s imperial machinations. The story is populated by characters that could only have come from the Victorian era’s large cast of eccentrics: the Maharajah himself, at once betrayed and traitorous; the mysterious General Carroll-Teviss, “a Philadelphia-born soldier of fortune who served a succession of popes, beys, and kings”; Levantine-Russian secret agents; and August Theodor Schoefft, “a cheroot-smoking Hungarian,” among them. Campbell’s investigation takes in imperial intrigues, intra-clan rivalries, intrafamilial homicides, mystical prophecies, and the long-thwarted dreams of Sikh independence as it delivers a satisfying if sometimes confusing story complicated enough to have come from the pen of le Carré.
And what did the box contain? You’ll need to read this absorbing detective story to find out.Pub Date: July 18, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-293-9
Page Count: 474
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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