Lovell packs in as many celebrities as possible, which makes for an entertaining book but not one likely to end up on a...
Lovell (The Churchills: In Love and War, 2011, etc.) turns her attention to the French Riviera between the wars and into the 1960s.
Like the author’s tale of the Mitford family, this is a gossipy book with courtesans and famous politicians hopping from château to château and bed to bed. Though British wealth ruled the 1920s and ’30s, after World War II, the Americans and Europeans took over. Within this glamorous milieu, one always needed money, but breeding, talent, beauty, sociability, and a good sense of humor were also very important. The author anchors the story with a biography of American actress and businesswoman Maxine Elliott (1868-1940), a grande dame of the scene. Though she is relatively unknown today, Elliott amassed a fortune—with helpful advice from J.P. Morgan—and built the much-visited villa the Château de l’Horizon in 1932. Invitations to her events were always highly sought-after, and she gave parties from morning to night. Winston Churchill, in his wilderness years, found sanctuary with her in his own suite of rooms to accommodate his staff. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, at loose ends after WWII, depended on Elliott for privacy and a safe haven. The list of guests is endless and includes Daisy Fellowes, Doris Castlerosse, and Lady Diana Cooper, ladies well-versed in enjoying the moment. The postwar years without Elliott made it a sunny place for shady people, until it was sold to Aly Khan, whose fascinating best friends were Elsie de Wolfe and the incomparable Elsa Maxwell. It was Maxwell who introduced Khan to Rita Hayworth, which led to the wedding of the century. As the rich and famous built larger and flashier homes along the Riviera, the days of Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward gave way to visits by the Kennedy family, Onassis family, and other high-profile guests.
Lovell packs in as many celebrities as possible, which makes for an entertaining book but not one likely to end up on a reference shelf.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-515-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
