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
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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