Susan Kingsley Kent

An odd book, perhaps suggested by it's series title, "The World in A Life;" It's difficult to write a biography and a history of 60 yrs of the British Empire in less than 200 pages. That dual purpose creates an odd whiplash effect: one chapter goes into some depth about Victoria's life, while in the next Victoria is an abstraction and we get microhistories of Ireland, India, South Africa, the fight for women's rights. The microhistories are excellent and may very well include things you haven't read before, such as Charles Dickens' racist, imperialist, pro-slavery writings.

Kent's own tone is a little troubling. Starving Irish peasants refused to pay rent because, she says, they were "bitter" (137). She seems similarly impatient with African, Caribbean, and Indian colonized peoples, as if, yes, she knows what she's supposed to write, but really, those rebels were all so messy. So on any three pages the book is excellent, engaging, absorbing, then you read something that makes you want to throw it in the bin. That, combined with the fact that it is an in-depth biography, then it's a history of everything, then it's a brief biography, then it's back to a history, then it's a wholly political biography of Victoria, losing sight completely of the personal biography with which the book began, makes it, as I said, an odd book -- but a keeper.… (más)