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
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
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