A sparkling family portrait and riveting history.
An elite family faces a vastly changing nation.
The three daughters of fabulously wealthy Percy Wyndham and his wife, Madeline, take center stage in Renton’s accomplished literary debut, a spirited and captivating history of the lives and loves of aristocrats in Victorian/Edwardian Britain. Drawing on letters, memoirs, histories, and abundant archival sources, the author creates a richly detailed tapestry featuring the three alluring Wyndham sisters: Mary (1862-1937), Madeline (1869-1941), and Pamela (1871-1928). They inhabited an opulent world. Among the family’s several residences was Clouds, an enormous sandstone-and-brick edifice boasting five reception rooms (the sky-lit central hall was two stories high), 25 bedrooms, two nurseries, and a separate wing for offices and bedrooms for the indoor staff, numbering around 30. At a time of social and economic upheaval, while other “landed elite” worried over maintaining their estates, “Clouds trumpeted to the world that the Wyndhams were founding a dynasty that would operate at the very heart of power.” It was a prime destination for clandestine political brokering, and an invitation to visit, Renton reveals, “was a prize indeed.” Madeline, in a flowing gown, smoking Turkish cigarettes, and festooned in scarves and bangles, was “a consummate hostess,” providing guests with masseuses, gymnastics classes, and “hand-bound copies of their favorite books at their bedsides.” Among those guests was a rarefied clique dubbed the Souls, “a group of very good, fiercely competitive friends, whether in romance, politics or friendship.” Extramarital romance flourished. Mary’s husband, a philanderer and gambler, flaunted his many mistresses. Mary’s liaisons included a relationship—not sexual, Renton maintains—with the prominent politician Arthur Balfour, who rose to become prime minister. Like so many aristocrats, Percy rued reforms that took power from the Lords. Political dissension, he believed, “simply proved how ill-suited the masses were to make decisions about the future of their country.” World War I, writes the author, finally drove an irreparable rift “between the generations that fought and those who sent them there, nowhere more so than among the elite.”
A sparkling family portrait and riveting history.Pub Date: June 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87429-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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