Smooth but shallow dual biography of the king and queen who succeeded Victoria on the British throne, by Hough (coauthor, The Battle of Britain, 1989, etc.). King Edward VII was 60 when, in 1901 and at the height of the British empire, he and his Danish wife, Alexandra, began their ten- year reign. The eldest son of Queen Victoria, Edward (known as ``Bertie'' in the royal family) was always a disappointment to his mother. At an early age, he failed to show aptitude for the regime of studies drawn up by his Prussian father, Prince Albert, and his spontaneous, fun-loving manner seemed far removed from the concept of austerity and duty that Victoria believed could alone save the British monarchy from the real threat of republicanism. So Edward was given no responsibilities and spent most of his life in sporting and social interests, as well as in love affairs. His wife had to endure not only this but the Prussian bias of both Victoria and the government, especially when Prussia seized Schleswig- Holstein from her native Denmark. Yet Edward turned out to be a very successful king. He was no intellectual, but he understood people, never forgot a face, and combined regal dignity with bonhomie. Trilingual in French, German, and English, his great achievement was to facilitate Britain's new alignment with France before WW I. Hough's account is well researched and a pleasure to read, as we learn details of Edward's daily life and of the limited extent of royal power. The author's portraits of Edward and Alexandra, however, lack depth and psychological subtlety—e.g., in the matter of Edward's habitual infidelities and Alexandra's feelings about them. An adulatory study of the British royal family before it became a soap opera. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09793-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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