The intimacy established in Indira’s early years is washed away by snippets of journalism toward the end, leaving this...
The tale of modern India’s mightiest matriarch and most controversial Prime Minister.
As Frank (A Passage to Egypt, 1994) notes, Indira Nehru Gandhi, daughter of independent India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was strongly influenced by family friend Mahatma Gandhi (no relation). Drawing on a variety of sources—including Jawaharlal’s memoirs and interviews with those who knew Indira—the author reveals how Indira’s professional and emotional relationships often intertwined, especially in regard to the men in her life: her influential father, her quarrelsome husband, and her two sons—Rajiv and hot-blooded Sanjay. The first half of the narrative provides some intimate details of Indira’s unconventional childhood in her paternal grandfather’s Westernized home: The only child of Kamala and Jawaharlal, Indira was nicknamed “Indu-boy” and (like her patrician father) educated abroad. Despite her privileged upbringing, Indira’s early life was far from happy. She anguished over Kamala’s chronic maladies and endured long separations from Jawaharlal, who was imprisoned several times for his participation in Gandhi’s civil-disobedience movement. After Kamala died, Indira defied her family by marrying Feroze Ghandhi (unrelated to Mahatma Ghandhi), who later humiliated her with his clashing politics and infidelities, until he died unexpectedly at the age of 48. Frank chronicles the triumphs and blunders of Indira’s career in a detached voice, but the scandals of her administration—including her Declaration of Emergency, in which she avoided resignation by censuring the media—provide a vivid portrait of the turbulence of Indian politics. The author also suggests that, at certain times during Indira’s leadership, the unscrupulous Sanjay was calling the shots. Although both sons blamed the strains of politics for their father’s death, Rajiv eventually followed in her footsteps, succeeding her after her assassination in 1984.
The intimacy established in Indira’s early years is washed away by snippets of journalism toward the end, leaving this account somewhat unbalanced. Still, this is a rewarding study for Westerners curious about the Nehru dynasty and independent India’s tumultuous political history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-395-73097-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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