An inspired, engaging comparative portrait.
An organic comparison of two highly flawed and deeply sympathetic characters at the helm of England at her most perilous hour.
Historian Weisbrode (On Ambivalence: The Problems and Pleasures of Having it Both Ways, 2012, etc.) navigates among the infinite accounts already existing on Churchill and the House of Windsor for a touching dual portrait of two historical characters whose greatness largely relied on the support of the other. The recent film The King’s Speech brought out the painfully human shortcomings of King George VI, “Bertie,” who always expected his big brother to become king and certainly wasn’t educated for the role. Churchill, although remembered as the country’s savior during World War II, had spent many years previously in the political wilderness. Both men had endured terrible school years and a deep-seated anxiety of influence vis-à-vis their fathers. Both had to step up patriotically to fill the vacuum created by political crisis: Edward VIII’s abdication dropped the royal hot potato in his younger brother’s lap, and Churchill was the only one capable of running the government after the disgrace of Neville Chamberlain. Although Churchill (not then in power) had urged Edward not to abdicate, it is hard to imagine how the prime minister would have minded such a king “with appeasement in the air and his integrity thrown into question.” Churchill and Bertie met for weekly luncheons during the war, with or without the queen; both men used language very deliberately; both had few intimates around them (“they were essentially friendless,” writes the author) but relied on the asymmetry of their relationship and the urgency of official duty to build “an armature of knowledge and trust.” Weisbrode makes a very compelling case that each man was “working against his own faults, on behalf of the other.”
An inspired, engaging comparative portrait.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02576-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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