A riveting, illuminating life of a remarkable woman.
The biography of Winston Churchill’s unfailing champion.
Political reporter Purnell (Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity, 2011) offers a sharply drawn, absorbing portrait of Churchill’s elegant, strong-willed wife, who was also his adviser, supporter, protector, and manager. “You are a rock & I depend on you & rest on you,” Churchill wrote to Clementine during one of her many escapes from the overwhelming demands of her selfish, “dictatorial,” and petulant husband. A lonely, shy child raised by her distracted and often cruel mother, Clementine married Winston after a brief courtship and immediately decided, she said, “to give her life totally” to him, putting his needs before her own and those of their children. No matter what slings and arrows were aimed at him, she was convinced of his greatness. Purnell argues persuasively for Clementine’s importance to history: she functioned as her husband’s astute political strategist; insisted that he consider her liberal, feminist views; vetted his speeches; and campaigned for his successes. After his reputation suffered horribly from his role in the disastrous 1915 defeat in the Dardanelles, Clementine urged him to enlist in the Great War, from which he emerged with a “military halo.” During both wars, Clementine took an active role, organizing canteens for munitions workers and lobbying to improve conditions for women and children on the home front. With impeccable taste and a perfectionism that caused many servants to quit, she created a warm, welcoming home in which the rich, powerful, and influential gathered. Among her many challenges was money: frequently, they were turned out of government residences when Winston’s positions changed; and he spent impulsively, buying estates that proved to be money pits and speculating in the American stock market in the 1920s, leading to a severe loss. While he worked ferociously to earn money from publications, Clementine economized. Purnell is sympathetic to the strains of Clementine’s life but unapologetic about her maternal shortcomings.
A riveting, illuminating life of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42977-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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