Tucking scandals neatly under the rug, the author unfurls an exhaustive biography of the Queen Mother, which may leave...
Former Sunday Times journalist Shawcross follows up his tribute to Queen Elizabeth II (Queen and Country, 2002) with an extremely lengthy biography of the much beloved Queen Mother.
Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (1900–2002) was six months old when Queen Victoria died, which should give readers an idea of the broad sweep of years and historical events our subject experienced in full. The ninth child of Lord Glamis (the Earl of Strathmore), the Queen Mother traced her ancestry deep into Scotland, though mostly grew up in a grand country home in Hertfordshire and in London. Known as Buffy, the young woman was comely, small of stature and full of fun, and apparently had many suitors. When the Duke of York, George V’s second son, Albert (“Bertie”), proposed, she rejected him—several times; he was unprepossessing and a stutterer, nothing like his dashing older brother, Edward. However, a taste of royal life was convincing enough and they married in 1923. It seemed they had a happy, stable marriage until his death in 1952, when their first-born, Elizabeth, ascended to the throne. Nonetheless, Buffy and Bertie were, like the rest of the country, shocked and horrified at Edward VIII’s abdication on the eve of World War II, plunging the country into a constitutional crisis. Now Queen Elizabeth (the first commoner to become Queen Consort since the 17th century) to King George VI—he took his father’s name for the sake of continuity—she won the admiration of the world for her resiliency and loyalty during the war, remaining in London despite the bombing of Buckingham Palace. An intrepid traveler, Elizabeth was, like her daughter, “a good judge of horseflesh,” and adored fishing and picnics, among other things. A consummate insider, Shawcross toes the royal line, rarely straying from his slavish devotion to his subject.
Tucking scandals neatly under the rug, the author unfurls an exhaustive biography of the Queen Mother, which may leave non-British readers merely exhausted.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4304-0
Page Count: 1008
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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