An edifying, uncluttered, and enjoyable picture of life in Regency England.
An exhaustive biography of a clever, convivial Regency woman who was “dangerously unconventional, a character too colourful for propriety.”
In an age of enlightenment, upheaval, and revolution, Lady Anne Lindsay (1750-1825) was a prolific letter writer and a dedicated chronicler of current events. Taylor (Commander: The Life and Exploits of Britain's Greatest Frigate Captain, 2012, etc.) sifted through mountains of material at her family’s Scottish home, including her multivolume memoir. Anne charmed all who met her, and it’s easy to see how, with her upbringing in Scotland amid one of Britain’s greatest literary collections, the Bibliotheca Lindesiana. Her broad education was the product of that collection, as she and her sister read voraciously. She met the age’s most eminent thinkers, including David Hume, Alison Cockburn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke. After moving to London, she found intelligent stimulation greater even than Edinburgh but without the small-town constraints. She was labeled a coquette because she was unconventional, preferring to befriend men rather than marry them. Her letters and journals are detailed, if somewhat prolix, but they give a wonderful picture of her times. She met London’s literati and politicians through her sister’s husband, who was a banker and gambler—never a good mix. It was his short selling that brought down his bank and caused one of the biggest financial crises of the century. Of all the men who wooed her, William Windham and Henry Dundas, both destined for high office, played the largest parts. When she finally married Irishman Andrew Barnard, it was Dundas who found him a position at the new colony in South Africa. Their years there were idyllic until her husband’s death, and she ably chronicled and drew the scenery and people. At the same time, she used her talents as a hostess to win over the defeated Dutch and to entertain passengers stopping on their way to India.
An edifying, uncluttered, and enjoyable picture of life in Regency England.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24817-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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