A massive, entertaining, and thoroughly unsophisticated look at the life of a woman the author believes is likely to be one of Britain's last monarchs. From the time she became queen at 26 to the present, contends Davies (Death of a Tycoon, 1993), Elizabeth has had one mission: to uphold the monarchy and all its archaic standards and practices. As a result, she has been left at the helm of one of the world's most prominent dysfunctional families. Davies rounds up every last example of bad parenting, scandal, and infidelity he can find in the House of Windsor, but most veteran crown watchers will see few surprises here. Despite his best attempts to substantiate Elizabeth's ``extramarital romance'' with one of her courtiers, Davies mainly delivers speculation. The queen, in fact, emerges looking rather saintly compared to her unfaithful husband, Philip, and her wayward children. Elizabeth comes across as fairly ordinary (she eats toast and marmalade for breakfast, watches TV, loves her dogs) and often seems little more than a 68-year-old woman with a very demanding job. Despite her wealth and a household staff of more than 300, Davies's Elizabeth embodies the dilemmas of modern womanhood—balancing the responsibilities of work and family, public and private life. Davies concludes that her priorities have not served her or the nation well, that between its heyday in the 1980s (especially in 1981 with the marriage of Charles and Diana) and 1992 (``the year the fairy tale ended''), the monarchy sowed the seeds of its own destruction and now faces possible extinction. Despite a serious final chapter offering prescriptions for reforming the monarchy, the hallmarks of this lightweight biography are wealth, power, sex, scandal, happiness that never lasts, and unnamed sources.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55972-217-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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