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
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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