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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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