A penetrating, spirited recounting of a courtier’s roiling life and times.
A new biography of Sir Walter Ralegh (c. 1554-1618), a handsome, wily, politically astute, and powerful figure in Elizabethan England.
Beer (Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, 2016, etc.) creates a sharp, sympathetic, and discerning portrait of a charming man of “dark, Celtic, good looks” who became a favorite of Elizabeth I only to fall precipitously from grace under the queen’s successor, James VI of Scotland. Without a noble background, Ralegh’s unlikely rise to prominence was fueled by his “energy, vision and intelligence” mixed with “arrogance, violence and deception.” An improbable naval hero (he could not sleep onboard ship, he claimed), he survived sea battles; a womanizer, who married in secret without the queen’s approval, he rose above sex scandals. He was a “cultural relativist in a century of religious absolutism” and a “poster boy” for “a more decent form of British imperialism, concerned not with “trade and plunder” but with settlement. For a time, his loyalty to Elizabeth ensured that he would survive the rivalries that rent the fabric of the court; in 1584, he gained a coveted patent “to discover unknown lands, to take possession of them in the Queen’s name, and to hold them for six years.” His plan to found the colony of Virginia was, Beer acknowledges, “only a tiny part of a larger geo-political struggle; Protestant England’s war with Catholic Spain”—the adversary nation that Ralegh hated vehemently. The author is forthright about her subject’s failings and clear in her admiration, as well, especially for his talent for rhetoric: “He was the master of persuasion, a man who could make you believe that defeat was victory, that black was white.” In 1592, imprisoned by Elizabeth, he bribed his way to freedom; two years later, he was “a freewheeling adventurer” once again, in South America on a quest for gold. After Elizabeth died, he became “a small cog in the very large machine of international power politics,” imprisoned, condemned, and beheaded.
A penetrating, spirited recounting of a courtier’s roiling life and times.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-434-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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