Sure-footed and evenhanded.
An impressive debut chronicling the brief life of the young man dubbed “the forgotten prince.”
Edward VI was the long-awaited heir of Henry VIII and his third wife, the dutiful Jane Seymour. Only nine when his father died, the boy could have been swamped in the complex postmortem court intrigues, lucidly delineated by Oxford-educated Skidmore. Instead, Edward carried the day against those who sought to proscribe his powers, and even the most casual gossipmongers were punished swiftly and decisively during his short era of primacy. The author sorts through the many attempts at sedition, treachery and treasonous activities (some real, some imagined) that characterized this period of English history, collecting disparate accounts and correspondences (some carried on in secret) to form a slow accretion of detail that provides a highly entertaining read. Skidmore is faithful to the mood of the day, careful to recreate the atmosphere of a society in which only the sovereign’s life had much value. “One man,” he notes, “had his ear nailed to the pillory for [erroneously] declaring Edward dead,” while another citizen had both ears cut off before being forced to wear a paper hat decrying his crimes: “LEWD AND SEDITIOUS WORDS TOUCHING THE KING’S MAJESTY AND THE STATE.” Gravely ill with consumption and cognizant that his own death was close at hand, young Edward made a series of decisions that would have lasting ramifications for the monarchs who followed in his wake. He nearly provoked civil war with his attempt to defy Henry’s will and pass the throne to another committed Protestant rather than his Catholic sister Mary. Skidmore occasionally lapses into lamentably stilted prose: “gone to victual” is employed with nary a trace of irony, and “whilst” is almost comically overused throughout. Still, the author’s access to a wide collection of royal papers and period sources ultimately renders this biography of an underexamined and important link in the Tudor dynasty an unqualified success.
Sure-footed and evenhanded.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-35142-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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