An engrossing history of an eventful reign.
The life of a reluctant monarch.
Drawing on prodigious research, historian Ridley brings astute sensitivity to her brisk, authoritative biography of George V (1865-1936), an “unpromising prince” who evolved “into a statesman king and the founder of the modern monarchy.” Badly educated, raised by a mother who alternately smothered and neglected him and a father who infantilized him, George was not groomed to be king but rather a naval officer. His elder brother’s sudden death from typhoid, however, put him next in line. Ridley does not inflate the personality of a man who preferred an ordered life, simple food, and the pleasures of shooting birds and collecting stamps. As a father, he bullied his sons, especially his eldest, David, the future Edward VIII; as a husband, he could be boring and sometimes frustratingly opaque. “The biographer searches George’s writing in vain for an inner life,” Ridley notes. Still, he rose to the many challenges of his reign, steering the monarchy through a constitutional crisis, the devastation and privations of World War I, the revolution that ended in the murder of his cousin Czar Nicholas II, “the collapse of dynastic Europe, Irish Home Rule, strikes, Bolshevism, the rise of the Labour Party and the Great Depression—only to be outmaneuvered by an American divorcee.” Ascending to the throne in 1911, after his father’s unexpected death, he became an “arbitrator-monarch,” confronting a host of political and Parliamentary problems. During the war, he added the role of “a service monarchy, making direct contact with ordinary people, similar to the institution as it is today.” Ridley makes Queen Mary, too often relegated to the shadows in biographies of her husband, central to this one, debunking the “royal myth” of her indifference and coldness to her children; elaborating on her contributions to British culture; and portraying her as strong, decisive, and regal.
An engrossing history of an eventful reign.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-256749-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.
That thing in the air that is deadlier than even your “strenuous flus”? Trump knew—and did nothing about it.
The big news from veteran reporter Woodward’s follow-up to Fear has been widely reported: Trump was fully aware at the beginning of 2020 that a pandemic loomed and chose to downplay it, causing an untold number of deaths and crippling the economy. His excuse that he didn’t want to cause a panic doesn’t fly given that he trades in fear and division. The underlying news, however, is that Trump participated in this book, unlike in the first, convinced by Lindsey Graham that Woodward would give him a fair shake. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they “had made a political survival decision” to do so—and surrendered their party to him. The narrative often requires reading between the lines. Graham, though a byword for toadyism, often reins Trump in; Jared Kushner emerges as the real power in the West Wing, “highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments”; Trump admires tyrants, longs for their unbridled power, resents the law and those who enforce it, and is quick to betray even his closest advisers; and, of course, Trump is beholden to Putin. Trump occasionally emerges as modestly self-aware, but throughout the narrative, he is in a rage. Though he participated, he said that he suspected this to be “a lousy book.” It’s not—though readers may wish Woodward had aired some of this information earlier, when more could have been done to stem the pandemic. When promoting Fear, the author was asked for his assessment of Trump. His reply: “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.” Multiple crises later, Woodward concludes, as many observers have, “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982131-73-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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