Very likely the last word on the late prime minister, whose legacy is still playing out in Britain today.
The third installment in Moore’s densely packed, endlessly revealing life of the Iron Lady.
Continuing a story that, though skillfully told, runs very long, Moore begins in the late spring of 1987, when Margaret Thatcher has just won her third victory in the general election. Electoral contests in Britain, he reminds us, are “parliamentary, not presidential, and are based on parties, not individual leaders.” Nevertheless, it is indisputable that Thatcher won on the strength of steely charisma and achievements that lifted British spirits, from overseeing the end of a long recession to securing victory in the Falklands War. Things were vastly different in 1990, when British voters took an overwhelmingly different view of her: They were, Moore writes, “unimpressed by divisions over Europe, the return of double-digit inflation and the perceived injustices of the poll tax.” Worse yet, Thatcher had become personally unpopular as well, seen as someone who had simply stopped listening to the people. When she entered her third term, her approval rating was 52%, but at the end, it was below 33%. Spy scandals and the morale-sapping conflict in Northern Ireland did not help matters. Engineered out of the leadership of the Conservative Party by challengers such as John Major and Michael Heseltine, Thatcher was not shy about nursing grudges, considering Major to be “a nice, useless man, who cannot lead.” Moore shows that her last years in office were not without their own accomplishments, including cementing a renewed relationship with the United States and helping bring about the fall of the Soviet Union and an end to the Cold War. Nonetheless, the author also points to the failures of Thatcher’s brand of libertarianism, characterized by the mantra “diffuse, disperse, devolve.” That strain of politics has lingering effects in a Conservative Party still tinged with Thatcherism, with such results as Brexit and the specter of a U.K. that will perhaps soon be disunited.
Very likely the last word on the late prime minister, whose legacy is still playing out in Britain today.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94720-3
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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