The author provides a host of intriguing insights into a misunderstood woman. Those who have read other accounts will want...
Pasternak (Lara: The Untold Love Story and Inspiration for Dr. Zhivago, 2017, etc.) seeks to “strip away decades of grotesque caricature” about Wallis Simpson (1896-1986).
The author offers a variety of thought-provoking arguments to counter the accepted wisdom about Simpson. Condemned as the woman who stole the king, Simpson’s biggest mistake was latching onto Prince Edward’s star; his own father said he was unsuited to be king, a sentiment echoed by others in positions of power. Regarding his kingly duties, he was faithful; he truly felt sorrow for his people as they suffered through rampant unemployment and perpetual hunger. The people loved him, but the establishment did not. Stanley Baldwin, holding all the cards as prime minister, played a sinister part in rejecting all attempts by Edward to retain his throne. He utterly rejected the possibility of a Morganatic marriage in which Simpson would have been titled but never become queen and any offspring could not inherit—though the last was irrelevant as neither party was capable of producing an heir. Edward was besotted with Simpson and called her many times a day and whined when she wasn’t with him; he was consistently needy and constantly sought the attention denied him by both his parents. He was a Jazz Age man, given to drinking, dancing, and generally latching onto other men’s wives. The author clearly shows how his love of American ways and cafe society turned most aristocrats against him. He was not bright, and when the couple showed an interest in fascism, it was only because it was the chic thing to do; he was too vacuous to take to any political creed. For all that was said about Simpson, Pasternak’s most illuminating point is that she knew how to soothe him and helped him understand the necessity of his duties; unfortunately, she was unable to curb his obsession with her.
The author provides a host of intriguing insights into a misunderstood woman. Those who have read other accounts will want to look at this other side.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9844-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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