Vivid portraits of some fairly crazy Brits and a way of life that deserved to be doomed.
British journalist Eade debuts with a well-written biography of Sylvia Brett Brooke (1885-1971), a tale that doubles as a history of the last days of the Raj.
The story takes place in Sarawak, a kingdom on the island of Borneo ruled from 1842 on by the autocratic Brooke family. The eponymous headhunters were the Dyaks, a ferocious and warlike people whose traditional practices the Brookes tried to eliminate, with mixed results. Sylvia’s husband, Vyner Brooke, became the third White Rajah of Sarawak in 1917, and she dubbed herself “queen of the headhunters” in her fanciful memoirs. Although an ineffective, irresponsible, disordered, hedonistic and largely absentee ruler, Vyner was vaguely devoted to providing for the welfare of his people, who loved him and celebrated whenever he and Sylvia returned to Sarawak. They rarely spent more than a few months per year in Sarawak, mostly to avoid the English winters. At home and abroad, Sylvia wrote novels, painted and night-clubbed; the author refers throughout to her unrestrained behavior and stories that “can’t be put on paper” but offers few specific examples. The ones he does provide—painting portraits of prostitutes, too much drinking and dancing—seem hardly excessive by the admittedly extravagant standards of colonial rulers. The Brookes were exceptional in their spending habits, however, leading a very high life (though rarely together) when back in England. The appearance of Machiavellian Gerard MacBryan as Vyner’s private secretary in the late 1920s launched years of plots about the succession; Sylvia was determined that her daughters not be excluded by primogeniture, but the Japanese settled the question by invading in 1941. Vyner and Sylvia were, of course, elsewhere at the time.
Vivid portraits of some fairly crazy Brits and a way of life that deserved to be doomed.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04589-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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