Rounds
Long, J. V. III
III In Brief EDWARDVII:PRINCEANDKING,by Giles St. Aubyn, Atheneum, $19.95, 481 pp. Edward VII has enjoyed an interesting revival lately, helped along by a popular BBC series. Queen...
...When he ascended the throne in 1901, he was well prepared to encourage those diplomatic steps that led totheEntenteCordiale, and enabled Britain to resist German militarism...
...This is a Creative Writer's novel: self-consciously clever and important, vaguely pretentious, and not very interesting...
...It is difficult to care either for them or for the book...
...His personality is curiously appealing to us today...
...This biography, although emphasizing Edward's political life (based, as it is, on the papers of his longtime private secretary), nonetheless admirably conveys the temperamental difftrence between the Victorian and Edwardian eras...
...Annie has miscarried several times, and the old houses seem to be the only offspring her marriage can produce...
...Frederick Busch winds his story through the lives oftwo fragile marriagus...
...Queen Victoria's eldest son was long thought to be a kind of disgraceful successor to his awesome mother, a fat rake who combined debauchery with an indifference to his duties...
...His mother arbitrarily cut him off from affairs of state practically until he became king at the age of fifty-nine, but he had by then become an institution in his own right: a leader of fashion and Society, but, more important, a confidant of politicians, both right and left, and probably Europe's leading authority in foreign affairs...
...But he did become a brilliant prince...
...There was but one Gladstone...
...And it tries to be a story about both medical and emotional healing, about reeog...
...III In Brief EDWARDVII:PRINCEANDKING,by Giles St...
...The pregnancyof an unmarried psychologist at Sorenson's school provides the connection between the doctor who cares for children, but has lost his own, and the couple who would be parents, if they were only able to...
...There was, it would seem, but one Edward, and this is a brilliant and illuminating biography...
...J. V. LONGn...
...The first third of the book, for example, alternates between the past and present tenses as it focttses on the Sorensons and Eli Silver rfspectively.Silver won't acknowledge his immediate past and confront the shadow of his son's death...
...PHILIPTERZIAN ROUNDS, by Frederick Busch, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $9.95, 244 pp...
...The Prince of Wales replied with terse simplicity that he had sought no advice and knew of no precedents...
...Eli Silver is a pediatrician in upstate New York estranged from his wife who fled in the aftermath of an automobile accident that killed their son...
...The device, and it is annoying rather than significant, shields him from his memory...
...Edward was the victim of his parent's stolid determination to turn him into a 19th century Renaissance man, and, in a perfectly understandable reaction to their monstrous regimen, he never became an intellectual...
...There is an impressive, sustained attention to medical detail in this book...
...26 September1980:545...
...nizing how we inflict wounds upon each other because we are mortal...
...his characters seem like marionettes not like human beings...
...Kindly to a fault, he seems to havebeen completely without racial and religious prejudice, a remarkable feat in his times, and was a greater, if less regal, figure of royalty than his mother...
...The author attracts attention to himself...
...The truth is very different, as this excellent political biography shows...
...When Edward and his son served as pallbearers at Gladstone's funeral, "The Queen, incensed that her son and grandson should pay homage to a mere subject, telegraphed to discover what advice had been sought and what precedems followed...
...Phil and Annie Sorenson have restored a number of run-down homes near the colleges which have hired Phil to make remedial students" eligible to enter college within a year of their having ente~ college...
...There is simply too much fancy stitching...
...The map of the novel is scored with types--eccentric, but not terribly fascinating academics who have found (what passes for) identity and protection behind the ivied walls of a small college...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 17
