Evidence of the truth that six times zero is—well, zero.
The dull and densely told lives of six women whose effect on history was negligible.
We can only be grateful there were no more daughters born to George III and Queen Charlotte—not that Fraser (The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline, 1996) doesn’t strive mightily to convince us of the consequence of her prodigious research.The author tells us early on that these women were “resilient, independent-minded women” worthy of our attention, but the many subsequent pages convince us of the contrary. Fraser follows each of the six—Charlotte (aka Princess Royal), Augusta, Elizabeth, Sophia, Amelia, Mary—from birth to death, drawing heavily on official and personal correspondence, telling us about nurses and servants, education, flirtations and marriages (not all found partners), relationships with their parents and their nine male siblings. Amelia died early (TB, at 27), but the rest lived awhile, and Fraser awards each a curtain-call chapter in the final 70 pages or so, telling us how she died, who was with her, how the survivors felt (they felt bad). The principal problem here is that these women just weren’t very interesting, and even Fraser drifts away from them to tell us, sometimes at length, about the madness of King George, about the corpulent, randy Regent and his troublesome wife (Caroline), or Caroline’s sad daughter (who died after complications from childbirth), or Napoleon (whom Royal knew and liked) or King William IV. And then, wouldn’t you know it, a really interesting woman appears, Victoria, and just how do you shift your focus from her and back to, say, the failing eyesight of Princess Sophia?
Evidence of the truth that six times zero is—well, zero.Pub Date: April 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-679-45118-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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