Warm, shrewd and glowing with love for her son, these letters offer an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman and her...
A mother’s letters to her son illuminate British history.
The beautiful socialite Diana Cooper (1892-1986), wife of statesman Duff Cooper, was separated from her only son, John Julius Norwich (b. 1929), for many years from 1939 to 1952. As war approached, the couple sent him to America for his safety. When he returned, he enrolled at Eton; at 18, he joined the Royal Navy. Missing him deeply, Lady Diana wrote hundreds of letters from which Norwich (Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, 2011, etc.) has selected those he considers “the best” in revealing his witty mother and her elite circle. A “Directory of Names” identifies informal, even chummy references to such notables as Duckling (Winston Churchill), Bill (William S. Paley, president of CBS, with whose family Norwich lived in New York during the war), Bloggs (Wyndham Baldwin, the son of the prime minister, with whom, Norwich writes, “my mother had a gentle love affair”) and Mr. Wu (Evelyn Waugh). Norwich introduces each of the sections with a sample letter to his parents and a lively biographical précis, setting his mother’s correspondence in context. Her own letters are charming, anecdotal and sharply observant, meant both to share her experiences and draw her son close: “I enclose my broadcast,” she wrote when he was 11, “not that I’m in any way proud of it but… so that we may not lose touch with one another. It’s so easy with the waste of seas between us.” Lady Diana, having no pretense of self-importance, was not easily impressed. Queen Elizabeth seemed to her a “plump little siren,” and Churchill, amusing but self-indulgent. She makes palpable the assault of the Blitz, England’s desperate need for American support and the dire conditions of postwar Europe, as well as her husband’s frustrating tenure as minister of information.
Warm, shrewd and glowing with love for her son, these letters offer an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman and her vanished world.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0922-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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