Next book

KING EDWARD VIII

A BIOGRAPHY

A well-researched, morally acute portrait of the monarch as Peter Pan, all the more devastating for its author's abundant...

Was King Edward VIII simply a Prince Charming who yielded his throne for "the woman I love" or was he, as recent biographers have claimed, a political naif bewitched by a sexual adventuress?

Given access to a wealth of crucial sources, including the Royal Archives and more than 2,000 of the Duke of Windsor's long-lost love letters, Ziegler (Mountbatten, 1985; The Sixth Great Power, 1988, etc.) strikes a balance between the two images in this evenhanded but rueful authorized biography. Ziegler quickly dismisses Charles Higham's sensational gossip (The Duchess of Windsor, 1988)—e.g., lesbianism, prostitution, sadomasochism-yet even what he does tell about the "half child, half genius" described by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin is painful. At first, Edward won affection with his common touch and his impassioned pleading for WWI veterans and better housing. Yet the winsome royal bachelor, Ziegler shows unmistakably, worried family and associates even before the abdication crisis because he drank too hard, loathed his duties and goldfish-bowl existence, lacked intellectual ballast, carried on affairs with married women, and refused to leave Wallis Simpson, a calculating two-time American divorcee who probably dominated him more through shrewishness than love. The postabdication years as the Flying Dutchman of the royal family are also examined with scrupulous but pained objectivity, particularly the Duke's squabbling with the royal family about his financial settlement, their refusal to accept his bride, and his unwary statements about the Nazi regime in Britain's darkest hours.

A well-researched, morally acute portrait of the monarch as Peter Pan, all the more devastating for its author's abundant good will and compassion.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1991

ISBN: 0-394-57730-2

Page Count: 550

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 21


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

Next book

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 21


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview