King Edward’s success in repressing stories of one of Queen Victoria’s advisers has now been overturned with solid research...
The story of the Indian man who took the place of John Brown in Queen Victoria’s life and heart.
Basu (For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18, 2016, etc.) had access to heretofore unseen documents, letters, and interviews regarding Abdul Karim (1863-1909) and his controversial relationship with the queen. Upon the queen’s death in 1901, King Edward VII immediately sent for all of Victoria’s correspondence, which they burned promptly on the spot. In 1887, Karim traveled from Agra to England as part of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration to showcase Britain’s empire. He was one of two Indians chosen to be servants to the queen, though he looked more like a nawab (a kind of Indian prince) than a servant. Eventually, he became a munshi, a teacher or counselor. Though she never visited, Victoria loved India, and many Indian princes attended the jubilee and were given pride of place at the table. Victoria also loved to show off her Indian servants to other European nobles during her annual spring vacations on the continent. Karim quickly endeared himself to the queen, telling her stories of India, cooking curries, and teaching her his language. Their daily lessons enabled her to read and write Urdu and to greet visiting maharajas in their native tongue. Of course, the queen’s household and the other servants were quick to grumble as jealousy and outright hatred grew. In class-conscious England, the author ably shows, Karim overstepped all bounds. He was not just a munshi; he influenced political affairs, was served with the household rather than the servants, and was given cottages for his own use. Karim gave Victoria someone to talk to; like John Brown, he lifted her spirits. In a book packed with names and hierarchy, Basu helpfully includes a dramatis personae and a family tree.
King Edward’s success in repressing stories of one of Queen Victoria’s advisers has now been overturned with solid research and crisp, clear writing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-43441-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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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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