A celebratory and entertaining royal biography.
Early-life biography of the queen, who “in one sense…is the twentieth century.”
As CNN’s British royalty expert Williams (Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte, 2014, etc.) acknowledges, Queen Elizabeth II has not lacked biographers. While breaking no new ground, the author’s lively, gossipy narrative offers a sympathetic portrait of a young woman whose path to the throne resulted from two unexpected events: the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, which made her father King George VI; and her father’s early death, which elevated 25-year-old Elizabeth to queen of England. As princesses, Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret, grew up sheltered, doted upon, and happily carefree. Their parents saw education as irrelevant for girls who were destined to do nothing more than marry well. Their governess was charged with tutoring them for an hour and a half per day. When Elizabeth was 10, however, her prospects changed. As royal watchers well know, Edward VIII, much preferring a glittery social whirl to the tedium of kingship, claimed that he could not rule without the support of the woman he loved, the twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. Like the royal family, Williams characterizes Edward and Wallis as spoiled, selfish, and irresponsible. Edward’s threat to abdicate was, Williams writes, “a bluffing game.” But the cabinet would not concede, he was forced to abdicate, and his brother was forced into a position for which he felt ill-prepared. As royal heiress, Elizabeth’s education somewhat intensified: she was sent to Eton twice a week to learn constitutional history. Socially, though, she remained sheltered (she did not leave her nursery bedroom until she turned 18), which Williams believes explains her intense romantic crush, at the age of 13, on debonair Prince Philip of Greece; they married when she turned 21. The author sees Elizabeth as exemplary: although “not born for the role,” she has fulfilled it “with grace and dignity.”
A celebratory and entertaining royal biography.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-891-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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