Courtly, engaging, down-to-earth letters by a kindly English aristocrat of the old school.
A lifetime of letters by the beloved queen mother reflects a tumultuous century in England.
Edited by Shawcross (The Queen Mother: The Official Biography, 2009, etc.), these letters by Elizabeth Bowes Lyon (1900–2002) move from the gushing expressions of a young privileged person to a grasp of sobering responsibility and mature conviction as world events began to shape her future. The vivacious youngest daughter to Lord and Lady Strathmore, growing up amid a big, happy family on their country estates, Elizabeth reveals her early sunny disposition in letters to her mother and rather disorganized education but keen mimicry of the Scottish dialect as written to her favorite brother, David. Evidently well-loved and popular, she attracted many suitors, including the stammering, awkward second son of George V, called Bertie, whom she politely rebuffed for two years but then accepted in January 1923 (“I feel terrified now I’ve done it…in fact nobody is more surprised than me”). Fourteen years as the Duchess of York followed fairly happily, during which Elizabeth (“Lilibet”) and Margaret were born. The untimely death of George V and the stunning abdication of Edward VIII delivered back-to-back blows, and Elizabeth reveals an authentic loyalty to her husband (“I am terrified for him…do help him,” she wrote to her reprobate brother-in-law) and growing confidence bolstered by religion and a sense of being in touch with the British people. Her natural touch helped gain the crown enormous support during World War II, as revealed in her radio appeals to British and American women.
Courtly, engaging, down-to-earth letters by a kindly English aristocrat of the old school.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-18522-0
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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