In a prodigiously researched biography of Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Pakula (The Last Romantic, 1985) draws a portrait of an intelligent and progressive Englishwoman at odds with the chauvinist imperial court of Bismarckian Germany. Drawing on over 5,000 letters between Queen Victoria and Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa (``Vicky''), Pakula traces the princess's life from her birth in 1840 to her 1858 marriage to handsome Hohenzollern prince Friedrich (``Fritz'') and through her long and ultimately unhappy career at the Prussian court. A pampered and willful, though gifted child, she grew into a strong and politically aware woman whose predilection for constitutionalism conflicted with the absolutism of the Prussian court, and whose inclination to meddle in state affairs was ill received in a country in which women were supposed to limit their concerns to home and hearth. Vicky's marriage to Fritz was a political idea that arose from the hope, felt by both Englishmen and Prussians, that the nascent German state would remain closely allied to Great Britain. However, the machinations of Otto von Bismarck put an end to these dreams, as Germany swiftly replaced France as continental Europe's preeminent military power. In Pakula's portrait Vicky, a committed democrat, felt estranged in her adopted country, as Bismarck moved to prevent her and her husband from exercising a decisive influence at court. Finally her son Wilhelm rejected her influence upon becoming kaiser, moving Germany more firmly in the imperialist and militarist direction pointed by Bismarck. Through the gradually worsening ties between Britain and Germany, Vicky maintained a close correspondence with her mother and emotional ties with the country and ideals of her birth. At first blush, Pakula's vast study of an obscure royal seems to make too much of too little, but she tells an absorbing story of a gifted woman, draws valuably intimate portraits of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm II, and shows how Anglo-Prussian relations degenerated rapidly from warm friendship into world war.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80818-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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
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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