A fresh-feeling account of the war years in London and the sympathy the public held for their royal family.
A wartime sequel to Logue and Conradi’s The King’s Speech (2010).
Logue, whose father inherited the private papers that Australian-born speech therapist Lionel Logue kept over the nearly quarter-century of his working (and friendly) relationship with King George VI, finally sifted through the rich cache just before the film version of The King's Speech was completed. The material that the author found would influence the film’s essential detail of the relationship between the two. Logue realized how loyal his grandfather had been in keeping private the work he and the king were doing to perfect the king’s speech, especially during the key war years. He also realized how essential Lionel’s assistance had been in bolstering the king’s public image, particularly after the fresh abdication of his more popular brother, Edward VIII, in 1936. As the second son, George (“Bertie”) was never meant to be king, and his speech impediment was a source of early humiliation and shame. After visiting numerous doctors (nine by one count), Bertie arrived for a first visit at Lionel’s London office on Harley Street in 1926 and made great strides by following the unorthodox breathing techniques of the not-quite-doctor and fairly untrained Logue (there was no such discipline as “speech therapy” at the time), who also recognized the psychological component to stuttering. Logue and Conradi swiftly move through the war years, providing fascinating details about how the British coped through the Battle of Britain—and the meaning for regular Britons that their royalty suffered along with them. When radio formed their major community contact, the speeches by the king—practiced by him and Logue, who eliminated difficult words and replaced them with deliberate phrasing—proved to be a salve to the public and inspired resolve.
A fresh-feeling account of the war years in London and the sympathy the public held for their royal family.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-192-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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 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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