A delightfully vivid, opinionated biography that pays almost equal attention to Albert’s wife and a colorful supporting cast...
An excellent life of Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819-1861), who turned the powerless office of Prince Consort into a major force for good.
Most historians have given Albert high marks. Prolific novelist and biographer Wilson (Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, 2017, etc.) makes a convincing case that he exerted a major influence on the modernizing of Britain’s society and restoring of the crown’s prestige. Victoria’s mother was sister to Albert’s father; both were aristocrats from principalities that supplied spouses to the British royal family for more than a century, and Albert was the leader in a thin field of eligible royal males. Historians continue to express wonder at the passionate love Victoria felt after a formal visit in 1839, a love that never diminished during two decades of marriage. Although Britain’s royal dynasty descended from the German, George I, who arrived in 1714, foreigners were unpopular. The press did not celebrate the marriage, and Parliament voted to reduce his annuity and opposed his ennoblement. Despite her love, Victoria was not inclined to give up her considerable, if mostly ceremonial, power. Overcoming his frustration, Albert skillfully reorganized the royal household and impressed Britain’s leaders with his good sense. Helped by Victoria’s preoccupation with nine pregnancies, he shared her responsibilities and increased the monarchy’s influence by emphasizing its lack of partisanship (the young Victoria hated the Tories). Liberal by upper-class standards, he enthusiastically supported the technological, political, and commercial views of the rising middle class, which transformed Victorian Britain into “the most prosperous and peaceful country in modern Europe—arguably the richest country in history.” Everyone cheered his central role in organizing the Great Exhibition of 1851, and by the time of his premature death, he was an almost universally admired figure. As usual, Wilson delineates his subject’s life with aplomb.
A delightfully vivid, opinionated biography that pays almost equal attention to Albert’s wife and a colorful supporting cast of early Victorian notables.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274955-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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