An empty account of an empty life, buoyed largely by speculation that Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson, the duchess of Windsor, although thrice married, was a virgin when she died. Drawing on the correspondence between the duke and duchess and many of the sources that supported his earlier works about the Windsors, the author (The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor, 1969, etc.) tries to define the woman who moved the king of England to give up his throne. Beginning at the beginning, Bloch speculates that Wallis Warfield's birth to a socially prominent family was not registered because of ``gender confusion'' resulting from genital flaws. As she grew up, according to the author, she developed ``a decidedly masculine appearance'' and ``a bossy personality.'' Be that as it may, she made her Baltimore debut with a thoroughly feminine demeanor and married a thoroughly domineering, heavy- drinking male, E. Winfield Spencer Jr. The marriage lasted five years, after which she traveled in Europe and China, where she was rumored to have picked up sexual ``arts.'' In London with her second husband, Ernest Simpson, she launched a social climb that led to her romance with the man who would become King Edward VIII. She, willing to be mistress or morganatic wife, protested mightily when the king planned to abdicate in order to marry her. She predicted rightly that she would be the target of England's disappointment. Spending the rest of her life successfully insuring that the former monarch would never regret his decision, her households, her wardrobe, her parties, and her persona were never less than perfect. Is the throne of England worth a lifetime with a woman renowned for her perfect grooming? Did her alleged masculinity appeal to the duke's rumored homosexual leanings? This book—in prose as flat as the duchess's chest—doesn't begin to probe those questions or convince the reader of her vaunted charm and wit. (130 photos, 30 in color)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15115-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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
© 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.
