Toye considers this enormously complicated subject with admirable equanimity.
A dense, forgiving study of the great British leader who was both of his time and flexible enough to transcend it.
Churchill famously asserted that “he had not become Prime Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” although the gradual unraveling of proprietorship over India, Ireland, the African colonies, Palestine and parts of the Middle East occurred on his watch during the first half of the 20th century. Toye (History/Univ. of Exeter; Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness, 2007) seems to be writing for a new generation of post-Empire readers, many of whom need to be reminded that Churchill was cultivated within a British aristocracy at the apogee of Victorian expansion, wherein, as Churchill remarked in his early 20s, the motherland would “continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilisation and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth.” Although he was steeped in the work of Kipling, Gibbons and Winwood Reade, from whose The Martyrdom of Man he derived the idea that “Empire and progress went hand in hand,” Churchill did not subscribe to patronizing, racist views toward the empire’s “barbarous peoples.” Toye tracks the evolution of Churchill’s ideas through his early journalistic forays in India, which provided him a nuanced examination of “frontier policy” in The Story of the Malakand Field; his participation in the British campaign in the Sudan, where he witnessed firsthand atrocities committed by the British; observation of the war against the Boers and fate of the South African blacks, which prodded him in a more liberal direction as his parliamentary career took off; shifting “diehard” attitudes toward Irish Home Rule, Muslims, Hindus and Jews as global flashpoints erupted; and his evident struggle to “reconcile the demands of his conscience with those of political conformity.”
Toye considers this enormously complicated subject with admirable equanimity.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8795-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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