Another sound feminist resurrection by a seasoned historian.
Though Norman queens were largely unknowable, leave it to this prolific historical biographer to bring them to life.
Having previously tackled the lives of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of France, not to mention the Tudors (The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Margaret Douglas, 2017, etc.), English author and novelist Weir presents five queens of the post–Norman Invasion era who sometimes wielded power in their own right, and not just as queen consort. While the author asserts that her portraits are based on primary material, there is scant little to go by, or what she calls with charming understatement “tantalizing gaps,” because “the deeds of women, unless they were notably pious, politically important, or scandalous, were rarely thought worth recording.” However, in England, the Salic code of the Franks, forbidding succession by or through women, did not apply. Consequently, not only did many kings gain their titles through their female ancestors, but some queens got a shot at ruling, such as Empress Maud (1102-1167), widowed queen of the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V and designated successor of her father, Henry I of England. The first queen Weir portrays is William the Conqueror’s headstrong wife, Matilda of Flanders (1032?-1083), who initially scorned marrying a “bastard.” However, after he roughed her up, she agreed to marry him, saying, “for he must be a man of great courage and high daring who could venture to come and beat me in my own father’s palace.” After their three-decade marriage and long reigns, their son Henry, acceding to the throne after the suspicious death of his older brother, married the controversial Edith of Scotland (renamed Matilda) in order to unite the Norman-Saxon kingdoms in the slow process of integration. Their daughter, Empress Maud, proved a shrewd, and not always well-loved, elder stateswoman. As usual, Weir is meticulous in her research, though the barrage of royal ancestry may deter some American readers.
Another sound feminist resurrection by a seasoned historian.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-96666-2
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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