Gilmour charts Curzon’s life through success and failure, turning in a well-formed view of the late imperial era in the...
A magisterial life of the renowned British politician and empire-builder.
Like his near-contemporary Rudyard Kipling, the subject of Gilmour’s recent The Long Recessional (2002), George Nathaniel Curzon believed that Europe had a duty to bring civilization to the non-European world. Curzon’s belief had a decidedly paternalistic component. As viceroy of India, he believed that his subjects were not necessarily corrupt, but certainly degenerate; Gilmour writes that “he found them childlike and often aggravating, but there can be no doubt that he liked them.” Curzon came by a sense of hauteur honestly, having been descended from a family that traced its ancestry to one of William the Conqueror’s lieutenants; yet he dismissed those ancestors as “a feeble lot,” arguing that the family would not have possessed the same estate since the 12th century “had they manifested the very slightest energy or courage.” Say what you will about his beliefs—and plenty of critics, including Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, twitted him for one thing or another at every turn—Curzon was indeed energetic and courageous, and he explored and wrote about vast portions of Central Asia before settling in to a four-decade career in imperial administration. In this work he had checkered success, for Curzon was not particularly well liked at home, in part because he was so openly contemptuous of his lessers and colleagues (and, one suspects, the royals as well). Too, writes Gilmour, Curzon often swam against the tide of world events, arguing in the wake of WWI that Egypt should not be granted independence and that Britain should not give in to nationalist movements in its colonies. Still, as subsequent events have shown, he was often right, as when he agitated for an independent Kurdistan against protests from Ottoman diplomats—sniffing, of course, that “he could tell a Kurd from a Turk any day of the week.”
Gilmour charts Curzon’s life through success and failure, turning in a well-formed view of the late imperial era in the bargain. An outstanding biography of an important historical figure.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-13356-5
Page Count: 728
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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