In a moving commemoration of the 125th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth, Soames, his last surviving child (Family Album, 1982; Clementine Churchill, 1979), presents a large selection of the intimate letters of Churchill and his wife, Clementine, from 1909 to 1964. Soames presents the letters both chronologically and topically, starting with the courtship and marriage of the Churchills in 1909 and swiftly moving into Churchill’s long career in Parliament and the government. Fortunately for Clementine, she reveals herself to be keenly interested in politics, which consumed her husband’s life and occasioned so many separations between them. The early letters show the Churchills” spontaneous reactions to the commencement of the First World War; the tragic Battle of Gallipoli (1915—16), for which Churchill bore responsibility and which ended his early career in the Cabinet; his life in France as a military officer; the Peace Conference at Versailles; and the Republican crisis in Ireland, during which Churchill was an IRA assassination target and negotiated with the Republican forces. Later letters record his reaction to his long exile from office, his travels abroad, the deepening political crisis in Europe, and his reentry into government with the commencement of WWII. A large number of letters date from the WWII period, as Churchill’s leadership of the government necessitated prolonged absences from Clementine. While he lost his position as prime minister immediately after the war, he regained it briefly in the 1950s. While full of references to the world of public affairs, and the acts and personalities of great men, the letters also contain ample references to domestic matters and discuss the Churchills” five children, their friends and relations, and family events. The long dialogue finally ends with Clementine’s noting of Parliament’s vote of thanks to Churchill in 1964. A uniquely intimate contribution to Churchilliana and an engrossing record of a remarkable marriage. (133 b&w photos; 6 maps) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-96319-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
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