An utterly enjoyable account of Victoria’s familial relationships.
The Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces in England shares her unique access to the quotidian history of English royals to treat us to another delightful story from the inside.
Worsley (Jane Austen at Home, 2017, etc.) is helped in this instance by Victoria’s penchant for saving outfits she wore at important milestones, right down to the shoes, and the author provides significant insight into her attitude to the throne. At first, she was a headstrong young woman trying to break away from the influence of her mother and John Conroy. Her father’s friend and servant, Conroy devised a system that he and Victoria’s mother used to control all aspects of her life. It was a system designed to ensure their power when she ascended the throne, whether as regents or advisers. Luckily, Victoria was sufficiently headstrong to reject them both. As queen, she relied on Lord Melbourne, a father figure, for advice, and she exhibited her strong emotional intelligence. After her marriage to Albert, she fell under his orderly, dispassionate intellect; luckily, she retained the empathy that made her beloved. Still, he often infantilized her, downplaying her abilities. As a mother, Victoria came up short, as Worsley amply shows. She didn’t enjoy her children except that they made Albert happy. She was tyrannical and never nursed them, since that would have made her feel “like a cow or a dog.” Albert’s influence was reflected in her thinking that women were inferior to men and therefore had no right to vote. She held him up as the unattainable perfection that none of her children would ever attain. Her grief at Albert’s death and interminable mourning are legendary, but it also made her realize that no one could have mastery over her. John Brown caused no end of consternation, but it was he who brought her back to the people. She made few public appearances, but photographs and two books she wrote about Albert took the place of her presence.
An utterly enjoyable account of Victoria’s familial relationships.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20142-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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