There is no shortage of biographies of Edward VII, but this thick, lucid and lively history deserves pride of place on the...
A highly readable, definitive biography of Queen Victoria’s son, the “black sheep of Buckingham Palace” who matured into an effective monarch.
Originally aiming at a short life of Edward VII (1841–1910), the eponymous British king who gave his name to an age, Ridley (History/Buckingham Univ.; Young Disraeli, 1804- 1846, 1995) unexpectedly received unrestricted access to Edward’s papers in the Royal Archives, a privilege not granted in 50 years. This proved irresistible; the author spent 10 years writing this top-notch life of the king. Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, turns out to be not at all Victorian, but highly sexed, hysterical, as politically assertive as her grandfather and a terrible mother. Readers will flinch at the brutal educational regimen inflicted on her nine children, documented as if it were an affair of state. Unlike his siblings, Edward was not bright enough to absorb it or clever enough to sidestep the worst features. During a long, frustrating adulthood, he achieved some independence but never escaped the baleful influence of his mother. Until her death, when Edward was nearing 60, she persistently hectored him for his idle, irresponsible life while refusing to allow him any significant political duty on the grounds that he was idle and irresponsible. His playboy image was largely deserved during his youth, less so when he matured, both in years and in his treatment of women. Ridley emphasizes that not only did he become a wise and reforming king, but that his achievements have been underestimated through efforts of contemporary leaders, such as Arthur Balfour and H.H. Asquith, to suppress his contributions.
There is no shortage of biographies of Edward VII, but this thick, lucid and lively history deserves pride of place on the shelf.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6255-3
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
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