A respectful and thoughtfully documented history of the British monarch but not the definitive biography one might hope for.
A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926) that highlights her many accomplishments.
As the longest-reigning monarch in British history, Elizabeth II is currently more beloved than ever. Recent acclaimed dramas such as the 2006 film The Queen and the hit Netflix series The Crown have further sparked our universal fascination, as each work has delved into Elizabeth’s more private life and aimed to reveal a woman with complex ambitions and passions. Daily Mail writer Hardman, who has written extensively on the British monarchy (Our Queen, 2011, etc.), approached this book alongside his current TV documentary. While not exactly serving as a companion book to the series, both vehicles assert a similar reverential approach to the material, choosing to elude the more personal dramas that have beset the royal family and focusing instead on the queen’s tireless work ethic and long-standing dedication to her role. Hardman examines the broader areas of accomplishment that have been particularly significant during her reign. “By any measure,” writes the author, “her life and reign comprise a vault of experience unrivaled by any world leader. It is one of the reasons that even those who are not royalists by inclination applaud her dedication to duty.” Rather than providing a linear account, Hardman looks at particular topics: the queen’s diplomatic accomplishments throughout the Commonwealth as well as Africa, Europe, and the U.S; her associations with various leaders, including her line of prime ministers and her close rapport with accomplished statesmen such as Nelson Mandela and the many American presidents who have come into power during her reign. “There can be few people in the USA, let alone the rest of the world, who have lived through the administrations of sixteen presidents—more than one-third of the total,” writes Hardman. The book is grounded in lucid historical detail and often highlighted by colorful anecdotes. However, as a full biography, the dense volume, while accessible, lacks an engrossing throughline to maintain lengthy reader engagement.
A respectful and thoughtfully documented history of the British monarch but not the definitive biography one might hope for.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-002-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
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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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