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
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
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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
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