The ties that bind the two countries today are, at least in part, of Churchill’s making.
Crusty old Tories long complained that Winston Churchill wasn’t quite British. His official biographer shows that they were right.
Churchill’s mother, née Jennie Jerome, was born in Brooklyn in 1854. It thrilled Winston more to know that one of his ancestors was what he called, in the parlance of the time, “a Seneca squaw.” Writes Gilbert (The Righteous, 2003, etc.), “the quintessential Englishman was not only half American but also one-sixty-fourth Native American.” Being half American did not keep Churchill from serving as an advisor to the Spanish government just before war broke out with the U.S., nor did he shy from answering the call when it appeared that the U.S. and England were on the verge of war over some tangled dealings in Venezuela. Yet Churchill’s affinities were always with America, and the feelings were mutual; Churchill’s powers of persuasion were such that Charles Schwab, the head of U.S. Steel, gladly violated neutrality laws to build submarines for England during WWI, and even FDR figured out a way to skirt those same laws to supply Churchill with airplanes before the U.S. entered WWII. Close feelings apart, though, Churchill often found himself flummoxed by American politics: He was irritated when Congress pressed for quick repayment of war debts after WWI; unhappy when, in his view, the U.S. allowed Russia to swallow up half of Europe; and downright irate at Eisenhower’s obstinate refusal to hold informal talks with Soviet diplomats, which might have ended the Cold War much sooner. Much of this will be a revelation even to those who know Churchill’s work and career, and Gilbert does a fine job of charting the statesman’s sometimes mixed feelings for the land he considered a second home—and his closest ally.
The ties that bind the two countries today are, at least in part, of Churchill’s making.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5992-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
