Reveals a livelier Liz: lovely, clever, wise, and—like all the other Tudors—possessed of the “besetting sin” of “rapacity.”...
In brisk, bracing prose, a freelance historian follows England’s first Queen Elizabeth from birth to the early days of her reign.
Starkey (Henry VIII, not reviewed) develops the thesis that among the young queen’s principal virtues was “a sort of humanity” that distinguished her from most of her predecessors, including her own sister, “Bloody Mary” Tudor (who burned 300 religious opponents at the stake during her short reign). Starkey believes Elizabeth’s early life should read like “a historical thriller” and, at least until the final chapters (which focus on religion), succeeds admirably in breathing fresh life into one of England’s most overstudied monarchs. Unconventionally brief chapters (one consumes less than a page) explore Elizabeth’s family background and rise to the throne. Starkey sprints through the life and loves of her father, Henry VIII, consigning poor Cardinal Wolsey to a mere prepositional phrase and gliding through the fates of wives four through six in barely a page. Elizabeth, Starkey demonstrates, was an “infant phenomenon,” mastering Latin, French, and Italian (her Greek was less impressive), while absorbing vital lessons from the political intrigues swirling around her. After her father’s death and her consumptive half-brother Edward VI’s brief reign, sister Mary became queen, reestablished Catholicism as the religion of the land, married an unpopular Spaniard, failed to deliver an heir, and died miserably. Arguably Mary’s principal legacy was her decision to arrest rather than execute Elizabeth, who was patently a participant in several failed attempts to seize power. “The Tower made a good classroom,” quips Starkey, ending this fluid biography with the observation that Elizabeth’s decision to both hire and heed capable advisers was “crucial to the success of [her] government.” Alluding to Adrian Mole and Goldilocks, freely employing clichés (“like a duck to water”), and cracking wise (a “rolling stone gathers dross”), Starkey pens a light, even frisky historical narrative.
Reveals a livelier Liz: lovely, clever, wise, and—like all the other Tudors—possessed of the “besetting sin” of “rapacity.” (16 pp. color photos and illustrations)Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-018497-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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 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
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