One of the least biased accounts of Richard III; the author acknowledges his subject’s faults without justifying them.
A new biography of the alternately reviled and beloved king and his times.
Skidmore (The Rise of the Tudors: The Family that Changed English History, 2014, etc.) draws from excellent resources, including the contemporary Croyland Chronicle, a firsthand account of Italian traveler Dominic Mancini, and The Great Chronicle of London, which was written around 1513 and “provides us with near-contemporary evidence of the reign from a London perspective.” In what was a continuation of the War of the Roses, Richard’s brother Edward defeated King Henry VI’s forces and took the crown. Edward IV’s reign could have been successful but for his favoritism toward Queen Consort Elizabeth Woodville’s considerable relatives. Her family garnered titles and lands while she exalted herself as queen, demanding obeisance. Edward’s partiality drove Warwick, the kingmaker, and his brother, Clarence, to rebel 10 years into his reign. Edward fled to Burgundy with Richard, gathered an army, and returned to defeat them at Tewkesbury. Warwick died in battle and Clarence famously died in the Tower of London. Edward rewarded Richard handsomely for his loyalty with lands and a palatinate in northern England and all he could conquer in Scotland. This was to become his power base, his strength, and, in the end, his downfall. With Edward’s death, Richard seized his son, Edward V, and named himself protector and then king. His sister-in-law, Elizabeth, took herself into sanctuary at Westminster, but the Woodvilles’ strength came from Edward, so they had no power base. Their attachment to Henry Tudor proved to be the undoing of Richard and the marriage of the two warring houses. The author properly places the characters in their 15th-century time frame, when loyalties could be bought, sold, and switched. Much of the story is well-known, but Skidmore brings a fresh approach.
One of the least biased accounts of Richard III; the author acknowledges his subject’s faults without justifying them.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-04548-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
