Thoroughly researched and entertaining, filled with delicious details for general readers and provocative argument for...
A detailed journey through the court and life of Henry VIII.
Popular historians have generally portrayed Henry VIII rather more two-dimensionally than did Holbein, viewing him (by and large) as a decadent libertine who killed his wives when he tired of them. Weir (Eleanor of Aquitaine, 2000, etc.), however, is out to change our perspective. She draws upon many years of research and her own very wide reading of English history in offering a rather different take on this highly disreputable man. The first third of her study concentrates on court life in the Tudor era, in which the author is able to point to many aspects of Henry’s personality (especially his rampant womanizing) as behavior typical of the English nobility of the period. In other regards, though, Henry was an anomaly: Originally destined for the Church (his elder brother Arthur, who died young, was expected to inherit the crown), he was well-educated at a time when many European monarchs were illiterate, and he became a great patron of the arts. Many of the more brilliant figures in his Court (such as Thomas More and Erasmus) helped to establish England as a center of learning for the first time in its history. Yet for all of Henry’s very real accomplishments as a statesman, there was a cold and calculating side to him that eventually transformed this striking and (in many ways) brilliant man into one of the most self-indulgent tyrants England has ever seen. In the end, although he may not have been the notorious villain of legend, Henry VIII was a pathetic figure.
Thoroughly researched and entertaining, filled with delicious details for general readers and provocative argument for students of the period.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43659-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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