A conscientious undertaking that offers plenty of food for thought.
The eventful life of Winston Churchill’s mother, recounted by a writer who has penned similar tomes on Mother Teresa and Laura Ashley.
Sebba (Exiled Collector, 2004, etc.) draws on many sources for her biography of Lady Randolph Churchill (1854–1921), born Jennie Jerome in Brooklyn, N.Y., but she makes especially good use of an extensive archive of personal correspondence. Jennie’s early years are quickly dispensed with, and the main narrative begins with a whirlwind romance that inserted this American beauty into the English aristocracy. She met 24-year-old Randolph Churchill at a shipboard ball in the summer of 1873; three days later, they considered themselves engaged. From this point on, Sebba’s text is laced with long quotations from letters Jennie wrote and received, and they add real dramatic verve to her retelling. “I love you better than anything on earth,” averred Randolph in an epistle written during the eight months it took the impetuous young couple to win consent from their reluctant parents. Sebba paints the big picture via myriad small details, making note of exchanges about the perils of smoking, telling stories about young Winston’s demanding nature as a child and indicating that Jennie was often bored by the pomp and ceremony that surrounded someone in her position. She had various affairs while still married to Randolph and wed twice more after his death in 1895. Jennie didn’t live long enough to see Winston become prime minister, yet Sebba offers plenty of evidence to suggest that she was an early political mentor to her son, including fascinating passages about their joint opposition to the suffragettes and quotes from friends who observed her “unswerving faith in his capacities.” Such material provides welcome insight into their relationship.
A conscientious undertaking that offers plenty of food for thought.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05772-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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