Fraser (The Warrior Queens, 1989, etc.) brings her personable voice and vivid historical imagination to the six women who married Henry VIII. This group biography pales, though, beside the richly informed and, however cautious, convincing (and almost identically titled) study of the same women by Alison Weir (p. 106). In her preface, Fraser insists that, contrary to popular rumor, she does her own research—which here amounts to a rather superficial sifting through common primary sources to the neglect of social history, and even of Weir's study. Fraser's interest is ``to discover the women behind the stereotypes'': Catherine of Aragon, whom Fraser says has been pigeonholed as the ``Betrayed Wife''; Anne Boleyn, as the ``Temptress''; Jane Seymour, as the ``Good''; Anne of Cleves, as the ``Ugly''; Catherine Howard, as the ``Wanton''; and Catherine Parr, as the ``Mother Figure.'' Fraser claims to destroy these stereotypes by finding in each woman intelligence, courage, passion—qualities that Weir offered convincing proof of—and by finding, behind the actions of each, political pressure to create an heir matched against the biological difficulty of doing so—for which Weir offered a compelling argument as well. In fact, Fraser's generalizations produce new stereotypes of rather stupid, passive women, pawns in a fatal game governed by nature and politics. For subtlety, individuation, depth, detail, and cultural, economic, religious, and domestic background, Weir's book is superior, although there the monumental figure of Henry dominated—a figure whom Fraser characterizes as ``the gigantic Maypole...all round which these women had to dance.'' Royalty buffs would do better to read Weir's book—though neither it nor Fraser's reflects contemporary historical preoccupations with the commonplaces of daily life, or feminist interpretations of the brutal and wasteful marriage rituals that victimized Henry's wives. (Twenty-four pages of illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58538-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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