Moving in a stringent chronology, the author’s impressive nuts-and-bolts account finds Churchill’s golden years crowned by...
Just when you thought there could not be another angle to this endlessly fascinating character, here’s a serious, thorough look at Winston Churchill’s lifelong struggle to pay the bills.
Writing for hire allowed Churchill to keep the bank at bay over many decades, as noted scrupulously by English financial officer Lough, who asserts that, during his long career advising families about their finances, he has “never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale.” Hailing from a family of spendthrifts, especially his American-born mother, Churchill recognized early on in his political career that he would have to supplement his official government salary by writing journalism, giving lectures, buying polo ponies, and speculating in the stock market, thanks to his financial guru brother, Jack. Like his mother, Churchill patronized only the best suppliers, and he was often scrambling to pay the bills, borrowing hugely to cover amounts owed to wine, cigar, shirt, and saddle merchants. His marriage to Clementine Hozier did not greatly add to his wealth, though his elevation to First Lord of the Admiralty in 1909 allowed him use of the HMS Enchantress and a fine Admiralty House in central London. While World War I impoverished a generation of Edwardian aristocracy, transforming them into a “new class of entrepreneurs,” Churchill managed to inherit a tidy sum from a distant cousin in 1921, quickly depleted by the purchase of a country seat and the birth of his fifth child and prompting stock market speculation. (Miraculously, he was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in 1925.) The U.S. stock market crash wiped out Churchill’s “new world fortune” (for each chapter, Lough offers a contemporary exchange rate and inflation multiples) without dampening his enthusiasm for America’s “vitality…[to] help shape his wartime strategy a decade later.” Chockablock with credits, debits, taxes, and inheritances, the book is nothing if not meticulous.
Moving in a stringent chronology, the author’s impressive nuts-and-bolts account finds Churchill’s golden years crowned by selling his memoirs and film rights.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07126-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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