One of the great, nearly forgotten enigmas of English history, presented, more often than not, with verve. Still, even Henry...
A vivid, if overlong, biographical study of identity and deception in Tudor England.
In the gallery of the world’s grand impostors, the handsome, twentysomething young man who sought the English throne as Richard, Duke of York, may have been the most audacious. He claimed to be the son of King Edward IV and the younger of the two princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard III. Miraculously, he said, he survived a murder attempt and would now take back the throne from usurper Henry VII. Was it true? Although English opinion assumed the princes died, definitive evidence has not emerged to this day. Yet several key members of Europe’s royalty—including Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Emperor Maximilian, Charles VII of France, and Duchess Margaret of Burgundy—backed the “Duke of York.” After eight years in which he allied with James IV of Scotland and even invaded England three times, “Richard” was finally captured, confessed that he was Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Flemish boatman, and was hanged in 1499 as a common criminal. Economist senior editor Wroe (A Fool and His Money, 1995, etc.) sorts out Warbeck’s conflicting stories, as well as Henry’s shifting efforts to counter this phantom menace to his rule. Best of all, she fills in the margins of this scantily documented episode with intriguing analyses of 15th-century courting customs, fashions (wearing silk, at a time when no one below the rank of knight could wear it, bolstered Warbeck’s credibility), and, most crucially, a cultural atmosphere that encouraged make-believe. (“Navigators often did not know which country they were in, what adjoined it, where the rivers led, or what its nature was; but, not knowing, they pretended to.”)
One of the great, nearly forgotten enigmas of English history, presented, more often than not, with verve. Still, even Henry VIII—a more controversial and consequential figure—doesn’t always get such in-depth treatment.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6033-8
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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