The methods of a Mafia boss characterized the career of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who in the 15th century briefly ruled England as Richard III. Here, Weir (The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 1992) throws new light on this horror story—and especially on the mysterious disappearance of the two boys who stood in Richard's way. In the 15th century, the succession to the English throne was never stable. A crisis occurred when the saintly Henry VI had a nervous breakdown and was ousted in 1465 by Edward IV. Henry was confined in the Tower of London, part of which was a royal palace, and eventually he was murdered there on Edward's orders, probably by Edward's youngest brother, Richard of Gloucester. When, in 1483, Edward died prematurely, Richard seized power as Lord Protector of the Realm, since the heir apparent, Edward V, was only 13 years old. Within weeks, Richard coerced Parliament into declaring him king on the supposed grounds that the late king's marriage had been invalid. Edward V and his brother, the ten-year old Richard, Duke of York, were removed to the Tower of London, never to be seen again, and most people assumed that Richard had ordered the princes murdered. Richard's former allies began to plot against him—but the monarch died in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth. Here, Weir relates these many intrigues and political executions in a highly readable, brisk manner that's at once vivid and scholarly. She makes special use of older accounts written by Dominic Mancini, the Croyland Chroniclers, and St. Thomas More, and she emphasizes the role of Edward IV's queen and her ambitious family. Above all, Weir argues her way convincingly through recent scholarship and the ongoing debate as to the princes' fate and Richard's role in it. (A genealogical table is provided.) A fascinating historical whodunit in which truth is more sordid than fiction. (Eight pages of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38372-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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