Calorie-rich fare for those who enjoy snacking on royal stories.
The author of Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters (2007) returns with a flattering account of Philip, who could have become King of Greece but instead married the woman who would be queen.
As the title suggests, Eade’s account ends with the 1953 coronation of the young queen. The author begins on a far grimmer note—the death in a 1937 plane crash of Philip’s pregnant sister Cecile. Hitler was then surging in Germany, and the teenage Philip was in school in Darmstadt, overlooking the Rhine Valley. Philip had a number of issues to deal with before achieving eligibility to marry Elizabeth and before earning the trust and affection of the English. His sisters married Germans, and he lived in Germany during the time of the Hitler Youth (he was not a member); he was in line for the Greek throne; he wasn’t a citizen of the U.K.; he had a rough exterior, perhaps exacerbated by his mother’s madness and his father’s absence. Eade follows Philip as he struggled through young manhood and grew up under the care of his uncles, the Mountbattens. Dickie Mountbatten, a rising star in the Royal Navy, encouraged his nephew to do likewise, which he did. He went through Royal Naval training, served on ships in World War II and earned the respect of his shipmates. Although he first saw Elizabeth when she was an 8-year-old bridesmaid, he later made a much greater impression on the future queen when she was 13. She came, she saw, he conquered. Eade follows the courtship and the pomp and circumstance, dismisses the rumors of his infidelity and lets us know how handsome, beautiful and well-attired everyone was.
Calorie-rich fare for those who enjoy snacking on royal stories.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9544-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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