With this new addition to Disraeli-ana, readers will be enlightened by the younger man and how alike he was to Mary Anne,...
A dual biography of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and Mary Anne Lewis.
Before he was Queen Victoria’s close friend, Disraeli failed as a lawyer, stock speculator and newspaper proprietor, but even as he found success, he sank into vast debt but found a satisfying, useful relationship. Hay (Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation, 2010) provides insight into the marriage of convenience that became a love story to rival Victoria and Albert’s. These two middle-class people succeeded as Mary Anne charmed the voters and Disraeli’s intense, clear outlook brought them fame and position. Mary Anne was a sailor’s daughter first married to Wyndham Lewis, owner of Welsh ironworks. Also a marriage of convenience, Lewis adored Mary Anne, and she lived happily on his wealth. She secretly supported her brother, paying his debts and buying his military promotions. At the time, Disraeli was always in fear of debtors prison, as his poetry and the romantic silver fork novels he wrote could never pay his debts. Lewis and Mary Anne propelled him into Parliament. He enjoyed Parliamentary privilege as opposed to debtors prison, but his eventual marriage to the widowed and wealthy Mary Anne paid only a fraction of his debt. She never knew how desperate he actually was, and she was deemed vulgar and graceless by the upper classes. However, the queen’s favor assured Disraeli a place in society. Hay provides interesting discussions of how Mary Anne’s devotion to her brother, and Disraeli’s to his sister, created major deceptions in their marriage. Mary Anne’s political acumen and her adulation by his constituency got him elected, and his brilliance made him a leader.
With this new addition to Disraeli-ana, readers will be enlightened by the younger man and how alike he was to Mary Anne, who became the love of his life.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-27063-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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