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
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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