An absorbing youthful biography and a messy history lesson that holds eerie pertinence today.
Daily Telegraph executive foreign editor Coughlin (Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam, 2009, etc.) infuses many of the celebrated traits of Winston Churchill (1874–1965) with a charming naïveté as he set out as a young man to reclaim his family’s good name.
Churchill’s determination to become a soldier played out against the illustrious legend of his distinguished grandfather, the first Duke of Marlborough, and the disgrace of his own father’s tarnished reputation as a hotheaded Tory statesman. As a boy, Churchill was obsessed with his collection of toy soldiers lined up in correct formation; he gleaned that “proving personal courage on the field of battle was a prerequisite for the pursuit of a career in politics.” Getting into the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, on the third try did not win his father’s approval, yet joining the cavalry proved his greatest joy. In choosing the elite 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, he got a smart uniform and a commanding officer, Col. John Brabazon, who agreed to take on young Winston as a favor to his well-connected mother. Coughlin’s bifurcated work moves between a winning biography of Churchill and a tortured catalog of Afghan history led by the precursors to the Taliban. Allied with his spendthrift mother to advance his career, Churchill tried to figure out how to achieve personal glory as quickly as possible, first in Cuba, then India. While his service with the Malakand Field Force quelling tribal resentment that erupted over the arbitrary Durand Line only lasted six weeks, his dispatches about the campaign published in the Daily Telegraph were remarkable and made his name as “knight of pen and sword.” Current soldiers in Afghanistan still read Churchill’s thoughtful account of civilization and tribal intractability.
An absorbing youthful biography and a messy history lesson that holds eerie pertinence today.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04304-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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