A great resource for gaining a further understanding of these two outsized characters and their era.
Lough (No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, 2015) has collected all available correspondence between Winston and his mother, Jennie Churchill, from his childhood until the end of her life.
With excellent explanations of the events involved, the author gives readers first-rate insight into the personalities of mother and son. “I estimate at least three-quarters of their letters survive,” writes Lough in his context-filled introduction. “Although many have found their way individually into biographies of either mother or son, they have never before appeared as an uninterrupted correspondence between the two.” Winston’s early studies were dismal; he failed his first two attempts to gain entry into the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, before he started in 1893. Many of his letters to his mother complained of lack of money and not enough letters or visits. The impression from his early years is of a tedious, whining boy looking to his mother to fix everything—which she usually did. Money was seemingly always a problem, and mother and son were similar in many ways. Both were selfish, short-tempered, and extravagant, and both talked too freely and always felt entitled to the best. Once Winston got his posting to India, he realized how little knowledge he had of the liberal arts. Amid catching butterflies and playing polo, he spent his time studying the works of Thomas Macaulay and Edward Gibbon. He discovered early his aptitude for writing and found a clear love of politics. His mother’s contacts would clear the way for both endeavors. His ego shows in many of his letters—e.g., he told his mother that during battle, bullets were not worth considering because the gods would not create so potent a being for so prosaic an ending. The author includes the available letters with very few gaps, notably after she married a man Winston’s age and during his Boer War escapades. Throughout, he always relied on her help furthering his writing and political careers.
A great resource for gaining a further understanding of these two outsized characters and their era.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-882-2
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 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.
