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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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