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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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