Sympathetic yet free of pathos, Vickers’s life celebrates an unusual and fascinating woman.
A well-crafted life of the late mother-in-law of the present queen of England.
Readers of an antimonarchical bent already know that the European nobility was and is a strange breed apart, carefully selected for recessive genes and bizarre behavior. As royal-family and celebrity biographer Vickers (Loving Garbo, 1994, etc.) shows, Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, came from one of the stranger clans, populated by proud members of the SS, globe-hopping adventurers, and figures such as a “morganatic” step-grandmother who spent her final days “playing patience in the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes in Vevey, and cheating to win.” Related by blood and marriage to the English ruling family and the German Battenbergs, whose transplanted members would rename themselves Mountbatten, Alice married into the Greek royal line. She was not often in Greece, for the Greeks prided themselves on being the world’s first democrats and did not esteem their royalty highly—besides, they were inclined to change governments frequently (23 times between 1924 and 1935 alone). When she was resident, Alice did many good things, organizing a modern hospital corps to serve Greek soldiers wounded in the First Balkan War and, under the Nazi occupation, sheltering Jews in her royal residence, for which service she was honored by a place in Jerusalem’s Vad Yashem memorial. (When thanked by one of those whom she sheltered, writes Vickers, she “said sharply that she had only done what she believed to be her duty.”) For all her good deeds, Alice led a tragic life marked by the deaths of family members and her own descent into what psychiatrists deemed to be paranoiac schizophrenia, but also by a religious sensibility that lent her an otherworldly aura in her later years.
Sympathetic yet free of pathos, Vickers’s life celebrates an unusual and fascinating woman.Pub Date: March 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28886-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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
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