A richly detailed look at Churchill’s early ambitions and triumphs.
Before he was a statesman, Winston Churchill (1874-1965) sought adventure and fame.
As a young man, Churchill spent five years as a soldier and war correspondent, hoping to win at least one medal for valor and intent on gaining public recognition for his writing. His well-connected and indulgent mother served as literary agent and publicist. Journalist Read (Human Game: The True Story of the ‘Great Escape’ Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen, 2012, etc.) draws on Churchill’s newspaper pieces, books, and letters for this fast-paced biographical and historical narrative. In 1895, Churchill participated in the Cuban War of Independence; the following year, based in India, he fought in the Anglo-Afghan War. Disappointingly for him, his dispatches from Malakand, where British troops fought against the Pashtun, were published in the Daily Telegraph without his byline. Determined to make his name, he plunged into writing a book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), which earned respectful reviews. Based in Egypt in 1898, he joined the Anglo-Egyptian army, waging battle for the reconquest of Sudan, reluctantly taken on by Gen. Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who was deeply suspicious of war correspondents and disdainful of his lieutenant’s obvious lust for glory. Nevertheless, Churchill prevailed, reporting for the Morning Post and publishing his account as The River War (1899). According to Read, the horror and slaughter that he witnessed darkened his formerly jingoist, romantic view of conflict. Nevertheless, he was drawn to a stint in the Second Boer War, arming himself with six bottles of champagne and 48 bottles of assorted other liquor. He had learned, Read writes, to look after his own comfort. Reports from South Africa to the Morning Post became his next book, London to Ladysmith Via Pretoria (1900). In 1900, the well-known journalist and veteran gained a seat in Parliament.
A richly detailed look at Churchill’s early ambitions and triumphs.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82381-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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