Readers who enjoy English history will be happy to have this in their libraries.
A series of biographies of the women connected to Cliveden, the house made famous in the Profumo affair.
The first, Anna Maria (1642-1702), was widowed when her lover, the Duke of Buckingham, killed her husband in a duel in 1668. Scandal was a way of life in Restoration England, and Anna Maria eventually moved into Buckingham’s London home—with him and his wife. By the time Cliveden was completed, they had separated. Elizabeth Villiers, a cousin to Buckingham, was educated with two of James II’s daughters, Mary and Anne. Elizabeth accompanied Mary when she married William of Orange and promptly had an affair with him. After Queen Mary’s death, William granted Irish estates to Elizabeth that made her the richest woman in England, which made for a convenient marriage to the Earl of Orkney and life at Cliveden. Orkney’s heir leased the property to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his successful marriage to Augusta of Saxe Gotha proved to be a contrast to the rigidity of the court. Harriet, raised at Castle Howard and a great friend of Queen Victoria, married the even wealthier Duke of Sutherland. Together, they created a calm retreat at Cliveden where Victoria often came for walks on the grounds. Harriet was also a prolific political and social campaigner, and she fought against slavery in the United States. Throughout its history, Cliveden was a haven for great minds, and famous guests were the norm for all the women of Cliveden. Nancy Astor (1879-1964) was an acerbic, quick-tempered woman. Like her predecessors, she changed conceptions of female power and served as a member of Parliament for 25 years. She made Cliveden a symbol of highly politicized forms of power, class and ideology. In her debut book, Livingstone ably avoids tabloidlike gossip to profile five remarkable women, and she provides a helpful cast of characters at the beginning of the story.
Readers who enjoy English history will be happy to have this in their libraries.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-39207-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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