Ninety years of dirt on the British royal family. Fearon (a British freelance journalist) gives us a blow-by- blow account of the royal scandals from the end of Queen Victoria's reign up to Prince Charles and Princess ``Squidgy'' Diana. En route, we're regaled with the amours of Edward VII; the death of George V by an injection of morphine and cocaine so that the news might be announced by the London Times ``rather than the less appropriate evening journals''; how Edward VII was maneuvered into abdicating not because of his resolve to marry Wallis Simpson but because of his Nazi sympathies, and much more. Fearon wastes no words as he passes from one scandal to the next. His achievement is that we now have them all in a single book—though there's little here that an informed reader would not know already. In tabloid fashion, the author exudes moral indignation, yet not consistently: He mocks George V's failure to rescue his cousin the Czar, popularly seen to be a cruel autocrat, and then condemns George VI's attempt to cover up the involvement of his German relatives with the Nazis. Fearon is at home with a vast network of political and royal personages and has a gift for evoking historical occasions—but he provides no footnotes and cites few authorities, so it's difficult to check his accuracy. Confidence isn't inspired when he confuses Charles II with the deposed James II, especially since the context is the choice of the name ``Charles'' for the present Prince of Wales. Fearon treats his characters more as objects of detraction than real people, and he fails to grasp that the royal cover-ups have been motivated, at least in part, by a particularly English sense of noblesse oblige. At once morally repugnant and compelling reading. (Photographs—24 pp. b&w)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-204-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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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