QUEEN VICTORIA AT HOME

Name: QUEEN VICTORIA AT HOME
Author: Michael De-la-Noy
ISBN: 0-7867-1178-7

by Michael De-la-Noy ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003

Historians won’t find much here, but general readers with an interest in Queen Vickie will enjoy De-la-Noy’s account,...

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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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)