A lucid account of one of the messiest, sleaziest and most dangerous times in British history.
An examination of the 1820 prosecution of unpopular George IV’s popular queen, arguing that it instigated and/or solidified a variety of cultural changes in England and perhaps prevented a civil war.
Although numerous biographies of both parties (e.g., Steven Parissien’s George IV, 2002; Flora Fraser’s The Unruly Queen, 1996) retell the story of Caroline’s trial on charges of sexual infidelity, it prompts perennial fascination thanks to its seamy and steamy aspects. (In the courtroom, some of the queen’s former servants testified about nasty stains on bedding and Her Highness’ hand resting on the groin of a man who was not her husband. American readers will recall the Clinton impeachment.) British journalist Robins begins with the engagement in 1794 of young Caroline, Princess of Brunswick, to George, Prince of Wales. The soon-to-be-newlyweds had never met, and when they finally did, some five months later, George was aghast. He found Caroline physically repulsive, unclean and smelly, and judged her behavior far too frisky for the staid English court. (Secretly married to Maria Fitzherbert—“the only woman I shall ever love,” he told his brother on his wedding morning—the prince was hardly unbiased.) George and Caroline managed to conceive a daughter, Princess Charlotte, but by 1797, the royal couple were separated and the Queen was living on the continent. There she traveled, spent tens of thousands of pounds and, according to her enemies, frolicked inappropriately with Italian solider Bartolomeo Pergami. When George III died, Caroline headed home to recommence life with George IV, who almost immediately sought a divorce. It proved to be an unwise move: the common folk preferred Caroline to her husband, as did most of the press, the opposition Whig party and political radicals. There were massive demonstrations in her favor, and her acquittal, argues Robins, empowered the people and strengthened the opposition press.
A lucid account of one of the messiest, sleaziest and most dangerous times in British history.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5590-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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