Tactful yet open: much like Georgina’s personality. (16 pp. color and b&w photos, illustrations)
Scrupulous, smoothly presented biography of a flamboyant Regency aristocrat.
Moving at the center of a decadent society, Georgina, sixth Duchess of Bedford (1781–1853), had it all: wealth, position, personal magnetism, and a measure of political influence. She was, writes British political journalist Trethewey in this admiring portrait, a social climber, but not a snob, thanks to the influence of her unconventional mother, a Scottish noblewoman who taught her that “with great privilege came responsibilities to those who were less fortunate.” Yet Jane, Duchess of Gordon, also made sure her children married well, in Georgina's case accomplishing through the most exquisite diplomatic delicacy a union with John, Duke of Bedford. The marriage was mutually supportive and deeply affectionate, though that didn't preclude the Duchess's long liaison with the artist Edwin Landseer. “Affairs were commonplace in Regency society,” writes Trethewey; though outward conventions could not be violated, the Duke was “a loving but not a passionate man and so jealousy was not a natural emotion to him.” The author covers considerable political territory: feuds between the Whigs and Tories, the Bedfords’ support of Queen Caroline over the Prince Regent, the satirical hammering the couple took in the pages of John Bull, the fight against Parliamentary bribery spearheaded by Georgina’s stepson. But mostly this is the story of a Regency family’s “unashamedly hedonistic” lifestyle, much of it centered around their 3,000-acre estate at Woburn (“run like the most exclusive hotel”), with more intimate moments at Endsleigh, their palatial rustic cottage. The death of the Duke brought less secure financial times for Georgina, but Trethewey suggests she handled those with her usual aplomb. The fact that she was an attentive mother—unusual for a woman of her class—also helps attract readers to the appealing duchess.
Tactful yet open: much like Georgina’s personality. (16 pp. color and b&w photos, illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7472-5476-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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