From Victoria and Albert through Chuck and Di, a panorama of British monarchy that, despite its resonant title, is just intelligently slung rehash. For anyone who's missed the past 150 years of Royal Family news and gossip, celebrity biographer Spoto (Liz, Marilyn, Marlene, etc.) has put the whole history in a user-friendly if unexciting genealogical package. Though he sets out ambitiously to ``examine the hazards of sovereignty in our time,'' he succeeds in writing a gracefully fleshed-out timeline of the Windsor family history, packed with just as much information about famous royal nannies as about who was sleeping with whom. Calmly and without sensationalism, he puts their affairs, both sexual and otherwise, in chronological order, giving royal scandals, including the affair between George V`s homosexual son Prince George and Noâl Coward, no more importance than child care. And judging from the descriptions of cold parents and isolated education, the poor young Windsors have repeatedly been crippled by their own aristocratic privileges. The family, which George VI dubbed the ``firm,'' descended from Germans whose first dynastic sovereign, Victoria, bore Albert's last name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. They did not become the Windsors until WW I, when George V and his advisors decided to secure the British monarchy by giving it a British moniker. (In reply, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Victoria's grandson, announced that he was going out to see a production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha). Spoto describes how British royalty stayed alive as crowned heads rolled all over Europe: by redefining itself, by going on exhausting PR tours of the Commonwealth, and by exploiting the media, which continues to exploit right back. A survey course in Windsors, with no new ground covered—and the old ground has just about had it. (b&w photos) (First serial to Cosmopolitan; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81544-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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