Although Dennison often relies on secondary sources and rocks few boats, this is an insightful, short look at the life of an...
A judicious but lively biography of the highly un-Victorian Queen Victoria (1819-1901), from journalist and historian Dennison (The Twelve Caesars: The Dramatic Lives of the Emperors of Rome, 2013, etc.).
“Stubborn, hotblooded, and autocratic” is a solid description. Early-19th-century education emphasized the importance of “regulating the passions, securing morality, and establishing a sound religion.” This, not the queen’s temperament, defined the Victorian era. “As it happened, only Albert ever persuaded Victoria to regulate her passionate temper, in lessons that were painful to teacher and student,” writes the author. “After his death, there would be signs of backsliding.” Taking the throne at the age of 18, she dismissed her domineering mother (her father was long dead); however, she was certainly not a feminist and remained highly susceptible to the men in her life. Britain’s constitutional monarch was supposed to be above politics, but Victoria made no secret of her affection for some leaders (Melbourne, Disraeli) and dislike of others (Peel, Gladstone). Above all, she cherished her husband, Albert, a minor German prince whom she loved at first sight and to whom she happily submitted. As a foreigner, Albert was never admired in Britain, but unlike the case with Victoria, his approval among historians has risen steadily, and Dennison concurs. His death in 1861 devastated the queen. Mourning obsessively, she went into seclusion for a decade, which greatly diminished her popularity. Although she lacked charisma and disliked public appearances, sheer longevity converted her final decades into an apotheosis of Britain’s glory. At her death after a 63-year reign, everyone understood that a significant era had passed.
Although Dennison often relies on secondary sources and rocks few boats, this is an insightful, short look at the life of an immortal if only sometimes-admirable queen.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04889-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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