Exciting but very specific, this work will appeal most to those already knowledgeable about the subjects and looking for...
An intriguing new look into both imperialism and a fascinating historical figure.
Prolific historian James (Aristocrats: Power, Grace and Decadence—Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present, 2009, etc.) homes in on the tumultuous years between 1898 and 1955—the span of time in which Winston Churchill (1874-1965) started as a staff officer and finished his last day of his second term on Downing Street. The author filters a vast amount of information into a brisk narrative of volatile geopolitics, and he punctuates it with anecdotes and personal moments from Churchill’s life. While examining the Dardanelles campaign, James pauses to consider Churchill’s nightly routine, “during which, fuelled by champagne and brandy, he expounded his views on the war and his vital part in its direction.” Just as the histories of the colonies are enlivened by Churchill’s quick wit and powerful persona, the motivations behind his political agendas and battle strategies take on interesting new dimensions through this colonial lens. James eschews a traditional biography, referencing Churchill’s upbringing and past only when necessary. What he does highlight is the man’s antiquated belief in “empires as the engines of progress that were adding to the sum of human happiness.” James deftly sprints through the long list of battles during Churchill’s career, focusing particularly on his struggles in Palestine, India and the complex aftermath of both world wars, when he found himself “trapped between his instinctive urge to hammer the enemies of the Empire into submission and the need to uphold its moral character.” This results in a book that is more analytic than informative, more likely to question grand notions of liberty and duty than to inform readers on the basics of the two historical forces in its title.
Exciting but very specific, this work will appeal most to those already knowledgeable about the subjects and looking for fresh insights.Pub Date: June 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-569-5
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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