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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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