Quite beguiling—but not for the genealogically challenged.
Accomplished royal biographer Weir (Queen Isabella, 2005, etc.) delves into a touching medieval love story.
The romance between John of Gaunt, middle son of England’s Edward III, and the lesser-born Katherine Swynford endured nearly 30 years over the last half of the roiling 14th century. The daughter of a Flemish knight who served Queen Philippa, Katherine de Roët was brought up with her sisters in Edward and Philippa’s lavish, chivalrous court. She was well-educated and cultured, and was married off early to one of John of Gaunt’s knights, Hugh Swynford. (Her sister Philippa married Geoffrey Chaucer, ensuring a close relationship that runs as a fascinating parallel to the main protagonists’ lives.) Assigned as governess to John’s children when he was married to the exquisite Blanche of Lancaster, Katherine earned the protection of the royal family. After Blanche’s death, John married a Castilian princess in 1371; he and the newly widowed Katherine probably became lovers the next year. She bore him four children, given the surname Beaufort, and was his increasingly visible consort, to the detriment of both her contemporary and historical reputations. John, for his part, was blamed for England’s failure to beat the French during the middle period of the Hundred Years War and for a truce his countrymen deemed craven. He became a scapegoat for all the realm’s difficulties, she was his “she-devil and enchantress” and they were direct targets of the 1381 Peasants Revolt. Swearing to reform his profligate life, John broke with Katherine for a time, but two years after his second wife died in 1394 he actually married his mistress, an unheard-of act for a member of the royal family. The Pope legitimized their children, and Katherine was his legal widow when John died in 1399. Bowled over by this tale of true love, Weir recaptures its glow in a fluid, artfully assembled narrative.
Quite beguiling—but not for the genealogically challenged.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-45323-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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