by William Shawcross ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2009
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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