Well-illustrated miscellaneous Churchill-iana, some of it good.
Winston Churchill was a skilled painter, albeit an amateur, and his still enormous fan base will welcome this mixed bag of writings about his hobby.
There is nothing bland about his paintings. As British Academy president Cannadine (History/Princeton Univ.; Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906, 2018, etc.) writes, “like his speeches, they were often bright, warm, vivid, highly colored and illuminated creations, full of arresting contrasts between the light and the dark, the sunshine and the shadows.” The editor begins with a fine 50-page history of Churchill’s fascination with painting—not taken up until he was 40—and then assembles his writing and speeches on the subject before concluding with a few essays by others, including Thomas Bodkin and John Rothenstein. The quality varies from delightful to inconsequential. The latter group includes several 1930s newspaper reviews of annual Royal Academy Exhibitions in which he chats about paintings by artists mostly unknown to even knowledgeable readers. Illustrations of these works would help, but they are not included in the text. A dozen short speeches, mostly to audiences of artists, are solid enough, filled with elements such as wit, scholarship, worldly knowledge, and colorful imagery and insights. Although an amateur painter, he was a professional writer, as demonstrated by a superb essay on the pleasures of painting. Despite an excess of charisma and self-regard, Churchill loved his paintings without implying that they were works of genius, and he always deferred to professionals, sometimes grabbing his palette to correct a defect on the spot. Returning the favor, some critics and artists agree that he took art seriously and showed modest talents. “While he never claimed to be a great artist,” writes Cannadine, “painting…furnished an essential element of his latter-day public persona as a veritable Renaissance man of exceptionally varied accomplishments.”
Well-illustrated miscellaneous Churchill-iana, some of it good.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4521-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
