A sturdy narrative of one woman’s awakening and strength in the early 20th century as she witnessed the vast societal...
The biography of an Indian royal princess, born in Britain, who found a higher purpose as she discovered her heritage.
BBC radio and TV journalist Anand devotes the first part of the book to a brief, comprehensive look at the history of the Raj in India. The story begins with the deposition of 11-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh from his throne in the vast Punjab, where Hindus and Muslims peacefully shared common language and culture. Duleep became Queen Victoria’s favorite, and his life in exile was extremely comfortable. In fact, royal favor allowed Duleep to live far beyond his means, gambling and incurring massive debts. Years of letters from him and his children demanding government support indicate just how well these displaced royals were treated. Princess Sophia (1876-1948), his youngest and Victoria’s godchild, led an enchanted life after being born in exile in England; her quiet charm and designation as a royal princess ensured primary status at all events. She and her siblings had no real feeling for India until Sophia’s sister coaxed her into visiting their homeland. Being exposed to such poverty and deprivation drove her to reject her life as a socialite and seek those who needed protection. At first, her work on behalf of the lascars, Indian dockworkers in London, satisfied that need, and she helped build a safe haven for them. Eventually, Sophia awoke to the women’s suffrage movement and found her voice. She dedicated her name and status to the movement, joining in census and tax resistance, and she marched next to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, daring authorities to arrest her as she fearlessly demanded women’s rights.
A sturdy narrative of one woman’s awakening and strength in the early 20th century as she witnessed the vast societal changes in India and England.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1408835456
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
