by Gyles Brandreth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2005
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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