An unfortunate demonstration that, at least in this case, the people who lend are not nearly so interesting as those who...
Popular Victorian biographer Weintraub (Edward the Caresser, 2001, etc.) returns with a languid account of a dynastic marriage between cousins in the famous banking family.
Though they were friends of Disraeli, Thackeray, and Trollope, bankers to the Queen, rivals of Midas and Croesus, Lionel and Charlotte Rothschild belonged to a group that Victorian England strove mightily to keep in the background. As Jews, the Rothschilds were denied official political roles in England despite their enormous financial sway across Europe. Weintraub (Arts and Humanities Emeritus/Penn. State Univ.) wishes here to place them in the foreground, and a minor strength of this strangely limp account is the narrative of Lionel Rothschild’s 11-year struggle to take his seat in the House of Commons. (His constituents repeatedly elected him, but the gentile Commons would not permit a Jew to be seated, nor would Rothschild agree to take the explicitly Christian oath.) Although the subtitle suggests a “love story,” its focus is often elsewhere. Yes, we are given details of their betrothal: he was 27, she was 16, they were first cousins, and the marriage was arranged. We hear about their wedding in 1836 and about the extremely painful abscess on the buttocks that killed Lionel’s father. We hear as well about the births and childhoods and struggles of the couple’s various children. But the allure of the astonishing Rothschild fortune is too powerful for Weintraub to combat, and so we hear ever less about love and ever more about the Rothschilds’ astonishing homes, their priceless collections of furniture and art, their travels, their soirees (Tom Thumb performed at one), their famous friends, the financial decisions that affected nations, wars, and monarchs. Then we watch them decline: Lionel suffered horribly from arthritis, and both eventually succumbed to strokes.
An unfortunate demonstration that, at least in this case, the people who lend are not nearly so interesting as those who borrow.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-2686-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
