No surprises here, but an accessible source for readers who can’t get enough of kings and queens.
After her first venture into fiction (The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette, 2005), Erickson returns to the familiar turf of royal biography (Alexandra, 2001, etc.).
From William of Normandy, who seized the English throne in 1066 and became the formidably galvanizing William I, to the remote Elizabeth II, Erickson covers centuries of British monarchy in knowledgeable, fairly dispassionate brief biographies. She moves chronologically, treating each royal subject where the previous left off (by natural death or murder), filling in necessary parentage and occasionally repeating herself. She introduces each protagonist with an epigraph: an extract from a chronicler or close observer of the throne that throws some light on the royal subject (e.g., Walter Map notes of Henry II [1154–89], “He was impatient of repose, and did not hesitate to disturb half Christendom”). Quotes from Shakespeare appear rather too rarely; few of the epigraphs are as juicy as “I am the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins,” from Henry V. Erickson apparently is not a Bardolator: She discounts his villainous portrait of Richard III as “fanciful imaginings” and confesses some sympathy for Richard’s last heroic cry of “Treason! Treason!” before being cut down by the invading Tudors. Curiously emphasized here is the fact that England did not tolerate a ruling female monarch until two queens, Jane Grey and Mary Tudor, battled for succession after Edward VI died in 1553. Perhaps due to the medieval Norman law that the property of a married woman became the property of her husband, the only queen who had previously ruled directly was Matilda, vilified for the same imperious qualities admired in her father, Henry I. Erickson’s prose is coolly restrained, though she does express strong opinions. She savages George IV (1820–30) for wallowing in love, gives Victoria only desultory treatment and lets off Edward VIII (The Abdicator) awfully easily.
No surprises here, but an accessible source for readers who can’t get enough of kings and queens.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-31643-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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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