by Peter Fearon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1993
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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