A footnote to Anglo-Indian history, to be sure, but a telling one, and very well done.
A carefully reconstructed story of political murder that began to unfold a century ago.
The mass killing of protestors in Amritsar on April 13, 1919, is a central moment in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. It is also a moment enshrined in Indian memory—and, in many ways, the beginning of the end of British rule. The officer who ordered the killings, Gen. Reginald Dyer, was forever haunted by his act, writes British journalist and BBC presenter Anand (Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, 2015, etc.): “His family would always believe that he died of a broken heart” and not the cerebral hemorrhage on the death certificate. While no one can quite agree on how many died there, hundreds or thousands, one man vowed to do something to avenge them, traveling to Britain and laying a careful trap for the colonial governor who had not only authorized the killings, but spent the rest of his days defending them. It took 20 years to enact that vengeance, but, as the author writes, when Udham Singh shot Sir Michael O’Dwyer in central London, he “became the most hated man in Britain, a hero to his countrymen in India and a pawn in international politics”—lauded, among other champions, by Joseph Goebbels as a hero of the anti-British struggle. Anand painstakingly follows Singh’s long path from the killing fields of India to the Houses of Parliament and that climactic moment, which might have resulted in the deaths of many other officials had he used the right caliber for the bullets he fired. Singh was executed for his act, though supporters tried to give him the means to kill himself while in prison—and his jailers therefore even took away Singh’s glasses lest he “break one of the lenses and slit his wrists.” A memorial in Amritsar now commemorates Singh’s act, which, as Anand suggests, was far more nuanced than the simple act of assassination it was made out to be.
A footnote to Anglo-Indian history, to be sure, but a telling one, and very well done.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9570-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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