Historians won’t find much here, but general readers with an interest in Queen Vickie will enjoy De-la-Noy’s account,...
A portrait of the ruler as a young pool shark.
Or at least a billiards enthusiast. “It has often been assumed,” writes English royal-watcher De-la-Noy, “that in Victorian and Edwardian England billiards was a game played exclusively by men, usually after dinner, when they could smoke as well, but Victoria learned to play billiards at Osborne, and she roped in some of her ladies to play with her after lunch.” There lies the essence of Victoria, the diminutive German who ruled over England for so much of the 19th century: she did the unexpected, and at unexpected times, pretty much as she pleased. This is a curiosity, inasmuch as it focuses not on Victoria’s decided contributions to the making and administering of the British empire and other matters of governance, but instead on her management of her own household, affairs, and time—an overlooked topic in general, and probably for good reason. Her training in such things came early, through what turns out to have been a rather unhappy childhood; as a teenager, she lived according to what was called the “Kensington system,” by which she was made to account for every second of the day and was allowed only meager meals of “bread and milk served in a silver bowl.” Small wonder, writes De-la-Noy, that Victoria “developed a greedy appetite as an adult.” Indeed, some of the best moments here recount vast meals the queen and her courtiers enjoyed, with groaning boards of “fowl with white sauce, good roast lamb, very good potatoes, besides one or two other dishes . . . ending with a good tarte of cranberries.” Though they left her rotund, it’s clear from De-la-Noy’s account that Victoria worked hard for those sumptuous meals, for she took an active and informed interest not only in the running of the empire but also in every minute detail of the household around her, and she seems never to have enjoyed a minute’s rest throughout her long reign.
Historians won’t find much here, but general readers with an interest in Queen Vickie will enjoy De-la-Noy’s account, however incidental.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1178-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
