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
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
