Richly detailed and documented, if not the final word.
Why would the likes of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and other literary lights of 18th-century England devote their talents to vilifying (along with the popular press) a “cranky old lady”?
First-time English author Field acknowledges joining what one of the duchess’s many previous biographers has called a “moth-like tribe,” aiming to produce a balanced, or at least less distorted, account of a life made fascinating by the power it wielded and confronted. It seems that in her time, Sarah Churchill (1660–1744), who with her war-hero husband founded the Churchill-Spencer dynasties, exerted more influence on national politics and policies, amassed more personal wealth, and made more enemies than any Englishwoman since Queen Elizabeth I. She did it, the author recounts, the old-fashioned way. Both Sarah (née Jennings) and husband-to-be John Churchill were thrust early into the court patronage system by which British gentry aimed to improve their standings and fortunes. But while John went off to save the Holy Roman Empire by force of arms, Sarah conquered the royal inner sanctum, becoming a confidant of Princess Anne, younger daughter of James II. Field ably follows Sarah through an era of turmoil, with the Whigs hell-bent on preserving a Protestant line of succession and out to scourge Tory Catholics. With Anne’s coronation in 1702, Sarah had the royal ear and used it effectively to advance Whig issues while her husband, embarrassingly, retained Tory tendencies. Then came the famous fall from grace. The Queen’s affections bordered on the unnatural and, at least according to Sarah herself, were unrequited; it may actually have been otherwise, the author allows, quoting numerous sources on the possibility of a physical relationship. Spurned in favor of a new favorite, Sarah played the lesbian card, threatening blackmail in correspondence with the queen, and the Marlboroughs were dismissed from court in 1710.
Richly detailed and documented, if not the final word.Pub Date: July 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31466-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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