The lengthy wink-and-nudge footnotes are more rewarding than the wishy-washy main narrative.
Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth, speaks—guardedly—in this gossipy, sympathetic account of marital shenanigans by a British broadcaster and self-confessed insider.
Having written a short account of Philip’s life with his help and approval on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2002, Brandreth can hardly be considered an unbiased historian of the facts he musters here into a larger, more detailed volume. He admires the stoic, irascible Prince Consort and believes “he deserves to be better understood.” Before they get a chance to do that, however, readers must first wade through a maze of incestuous genealogy. Philip and Elizabeth are cousins, both descendants of Queen Victoria: he via Louis of Battenberg, transliterated to Mountbatten in 1917 in the interests of patriotism; and she through her father, who became George VI upon the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. Brandreth follows their fairy-tale romance in the early ‘40s, when the slim, fair, handsome Royal Navy officer first caught teenaged Elizabeth’s eye. They married in 1947; the births of Charles (1948) and Anne (1950) preceded the death of George VI and their mother’s spectacular coronation in 1952. Victoria’s consort had worked closely with the queen, serving effectively as her confidential assistant, but Philip was told to keep out of the way, as the monarchy had changed from an executive power to an institution with which he “had to fit in.” Another emasculating blow arrived when Elizabeth took her prime minister’s advice and gave their children her family name, Windsor, rather than Mountbatten. Though shy as a child, sheltered and happy in the company of her dogs and horses, Elizabeth confidently assumed the role of queen, while Philip, relegated to the sidelines, became “scratchy.” Brandreth devotes pages to speculations about the Prince Consort’s marital fidelity, aspiring to “nail the issue once and for all”; in the end, he limply concedes that Philip likes the company of larky young “playmates.”
The lengthy wink-and-nudge footnotes are more rewarding than the wishy-washy main narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-06113-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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