A touching read, with a fictional character to admire.
A moving, complex and well-crafted fictional biography uses pivotal historic events of the 20th century as its venue.
Henry Brown is the last of three sons born in London in 1901 to Leopold and Charlotte Brown, a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. Orphaned at 18, Leopold is bestowed a hefty inheritance, but lacking drive and ambition, he accomplishes little with it. Wanting his three sons to acquire a better education and achieve more, he and Charlotte hire governesses to teach the boys art, music and language. They are raised in a structured and orderly Edwardian environment, but contrary to the popular method of child rearing of the era, the boys spend much time with their parents, living happily in their grand home in London as well as in their country home in Wycombe. Life is good–until 1914 when England is pulled into World War I, and Henry’s brothers are claimed as victims. Their deaths prove to be the trigger point for the demise of Henry’s parents’ marriage, with Charlotte becoming absorbed by important political and charitable work and Leopold eventually drinking himself to death. Apprehensive of following in his brothers’ footsteps into the army, Henry opts for military school. Capable, intelligent and multilingual, Henry is appointed an attaché to the Viceroy of India, the first of many political positions he will serve. He meets and falls in love with Henrietta, the daughter of wealthy and staunch anti-Semitic parents, and their marriage is a contented one–she soon gives birth to a son and daughter. But a mission in Berlin leads to a tragic and pivotal moment in his life. Henrietta, who thrives on attending lavish galas with socialites, is swept up in the rising popularity of the Führer and becomes a strong proponent of Nazi ideology. For a while, Henry tolerates her anti-Semitism until he sees that their children are next to be indoctrinated. The complex political and cultural situations are skillfully managed and Maitland-Lewis renders the multitudinous cast of characters with marvelous detail. Only some instances of improbable dialogue interrupt the easy flow.
A touching read, with a fictional character to admire.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2004
ISBN: 978-1-413-414295
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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