A sparkling family portrait and riveting history.
An elite family faces a vastly changing nation.
The three daughters of fabulously wealthy Percy Wyndham and his wife, Madeline, take center stage in Renton’s accomplished literary debut, a spirited and captivating history of the lives and loves of aristocrats in Victorian/Edwardian Britain. Drawing on letters, memoirs, histories, and abundant archival sources, the author creates a richly detailed tapestry featuring the three alluring Wyndham sisters: Mary (1862-1937), Madeline (1869-1941), and Pamela (1871-1928). They inhabited an opulent world. Among the family’s several residences was Clouds, an enormous sandstone-and-brick edifice boasting five reception rooms (the sky-lit central hall was two stories high), 25 bedrooms, two nurseries, and a separate wing for offices and bedrooms for the indoor staff, numbering around 30. At a time of social and economic upheaval, while other “landed elite” worried over maintaining their estates, “Clouds trumpeted to the world that the Wyndhams were founding a dynasty that would operate at the very heart of power.” It was a prime destination for clandestine political brokering, and an invitation to visit, Renton reveals, “was a prize indeed.” Madeline, in a flowing gown, smoking Turkish cigarettes, and festooned in scarves and bangles, was “a consummate hostess,” providing guests with masseuses, gymnastics classes, and “hand-bound copies of their favorite books at their bedsides.” Among those guests was a rarefied clique dubbed the Souls, “a group of very good, fiercely competitive friends, whether in romance, politics or friendship.” Extramarital romance flourished. Mary’s husband, a philanderer and gambler, flaunted his many mistresses. Mary’s liaisons included a relationship—not sexual, Renton maintains—with the prominent politician Arthur Balfour, who rose to become prime minister. Like so many aristocrats, Percy rued reforms that took power from the Lords. Political dissension, he believed, “simply proved how ill-suited the masses were to make decisions about the future of their country.” World War I, writes the author, finally drove an irreparable rift “between the generations that fought and those who sent them there, nowhere more so than among the elite.”
A sparkling family portrait and riveting history.Pub Date: June 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87429-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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