Little to keep you absorbed when second-rate palace intrigue is the only thing on the menu.
From English journalist de Courcy, an un-thrilling biography of the daughters of Lord Curzon, whose lives seem an exercise in privilege with only a measure of excitement.
English statesman and viceroy of India, Lord Curzon was a peer of the realm with a substantial boodle. Chancellor of Cambridge and rector of Glasgow University, with a backbone as supple as reinforced concrete, he was anxious for a male heir but found himself instead with daughters Irene, Cynthia, and Alexandra. Here, he’s portrayed as a distant father, aloof and stiff, but unconstrained by the rules of marriage, and his daughters apparently also displayed his gamut of personality types. They were neither milquetoasts nor shrinking violets, fire-breathers nor buckers of the status quo, of which they were happy beneficiaries: they had fat trusts from their maternal grandfather, allowing them a latitude others couldn’t dream of. With the death of the girls’ mother, Curzon grew even more removed from his daughters, who very much took on lives of their own, and after his remarriage, he became to them “little more than a disappointing presence.” One daughter became involved in a forgettable way with the Wallis Simpson affair with Edward VIII, and another devoted her years to charity work, a choice elevating her to near-sainthood in this brood. The third, Baba—Alexandra—had a long, convoluted, and sordid relationship with the dreadful Tom Mosley, a drummer throughout Britain of support for fascism who, says Baba, had “stimulating provocative ideas” and a “sharp-edge wit.” There are unexpected glimpses of how easily influenced the policies of English government could be, but there are just as many crises over whether to wear a gray or black jacket with striped pants for dinner.
Little to keep you absorbed when second-rate palace intrigue is the only thing on the menu.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621061-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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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