Worthwhile reading for lovers of historical romance and the ever-engrossing Mitfords.
Hilton (Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens, 2009, etc.) provides a sensationalistic, fast-paced account of the decades-long affair between the British novelist/biographer/socialite Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski, a colonel of the Free French Forces.
The author ably captures life for members of her protagonists' respective social strata as they cycled through rural England, London, Paris, Bilbao, Rome and Versailles in the years of and between the world wars. Hilton packs the narrative with such a dizzying array of people and places that readers will be constantly stimulated, if slightly bewildered. The author brings the notoriously viperous Mitford to life more effectively than she does the womanizing Palewski, whose romantic exploits, while recounted with admirable thoroughness, conjure only a vague impression of their executor. Perhaps this is the inevitable consequence of Mitford's greater fame. Hilton's prose is energetic and entertaining, though her speculation about Mitford's feelings at various points in her life can come across as strained. It is the duty of writers of historical nonfiction to theorize about their subjects' states of mind—a dry recitation of the facts of a person's life hardly makes for good reading. However, as Hilton acknowledges, “[Mitford's] true feelings can only be a matter of conjecture.” It seems no less presumptuous to insist that Mitford was a model of sophistication and restraint who accepted her lover's philandering with understanding and equanimity than it is to insist she was a pathetically passive victim of male faithlessness. Those who adhere rigidly to either view are probably mistaken, at least in some respects.
Worthwhile reading for lovers of historical romance and the ever-engrossing Mitfords.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-392-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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