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 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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