An affectionate study by a respected Churchill scholar.
An engaging alphabetical encyclopedia of the animals Winston Churchill loved (and hunted) and used as imagery and metaphors in his fiery prose.
It takes a devoted scholar of Churchill to be able to convey with fluent familiarity such details in the British leader’s life and extensive body of writing. British author Brendon (Eminent Elizabethans: Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher, Prince Charles & Mick Jagger, 2013, etc.)—fellow of Churchill College and of the Royal Society of Literature and the former keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre—certainly fits the bill, and he offers an unquestionably unique look at the former prime minister. As the son of an aristocrat (his American mother’s family was also wealthy) born at the splendid palace of Blenheim, Churchill was raised to revere hunting as the apotheosis of Victorian male valor and virility; at the same time, he was taught that “kindness to animals was the mark and the duty of civilization” (despite his carnivorous diet). The “inconsistencies” in Churchill’s “wit, wisdom, and wayward genius” abound, and Brendon knocks against them throughout the book. The “bestiary” starts with “albatross”—the well-read Churchill used the Ancient Mariner’s anguished response “I shot the Albatross” while expressing his frustration with Parliament’s wrangling about Indian independence—and ends with “zoos,” since one of his favorite activities was visiting them. Many of the animals in his metaphorical repertory came from the countryside, which he knew intimately as a boy. These include badgers, birds, hares, and foxes, animals he loved as a “humane sentimentalist” but also hunted for sport. Regarding lions, writes the author, “no twentieth-century leader has been more lionized or has attracted more leonine imagery than Churchill.” Dogs and horses were his favorites, but Brendon’s most touching portrait shows Churchill feeding his beloved “golden horde” of goldfish at Chartwell as a distraction from the overbearing worries of the 1940s.
An affectionate study by a respected Churchill scholar.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-136-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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