Essential reading for Elizabeth’s admirers and a good vehicle for Americans seeking to understand the affection she commands.
A richly illustrated, well-written biography of England’s reigning monarch, now celebrating 50 years on the throne.
Readers who remember Shawcross (Deliver Us from Evil, 2000, etc.) for his excoriating reports on the Vietnam War policies of Nixon and Kissinger may be surprised to find him penning this extended love letter to his country’s figurehead. But he delivers a nuanced, highly sympathetic portrait of a woman whose story, he holds, is “one of duty done with devotion and diligence in a kingdom that has been utterly transformed around her.” Shawcross often touches on just how sweeping the changes in British society have been since Elizabeth succeeded her father in 1952. To name just one instance, half a century ago, a national furor forced Princess Margaret to renounce matrimony with the divorced man she loved; since then, no royal marriage except the queen’s has gone unbroken. Shawcross points out that, though plagued by bad press, Elizabeth has been highly effective in adjusting the monarchy to modern requirements. He cites in particular her remarkable job of crafting a working commonwealth from the tattered remnants of the British empire, “an achievement made possible,” comments Zambian president and former opponent Kenneth Kuanda, “because of the personality of Queen Elizabeth.” Shawcross writes with restraint about the tensions between Elizabeth and the late Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson, wisely suggesting that the queen came in for public criticism not so much because her daughters-in-law were right in their various complaints against their spouses, but because “one of the royal family’s functions is, in writer Rebecca West’s phrase, to hold up to the public ‘a presentation of ourselves doing well.’ When some of them do badly, we do not like what we see of ourselves.”
Essential reading for Elizabeth’s admirers and a good vehicle for Americans seeking to understand the affection she commands.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2676-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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