A boon to fans of English royal history, full of murder and mayhem, but also of solid analysis of a maddeningly complicated...
A rich account of the six long-celebrated women who, for better or worse, shared the throne with the ax-happy Tudor king.
Legend has treated Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr as the hapless victims of a murderous and adulterous blowhard, but Cambridge University fellow Starkey (Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne, 2000) shows that almost all of them were as involved as Henry VIII in the problems of governance in a tumultuous time—and thus, in many ways, helped sow the seeds of their own destruction. Henry’s first wife had been brought to England as the wife of his older brother Arthur, the intended heir of Henry VII (“Henry [VIII] was only the spare”), in order at least in part to seal a Spanish-English alliance against France; alas for poor Catherine, who took an activist role as queen, her commitment to Inquisition-style Catholicism and failure to produce an heir led to one of the messiest divorces in recorded history—and one, Starkey gamely writes, in which she had the better lawyers. Though Catherine’s successor, Anne Boleyn, has come to be known as “Anne of a Thousand Days,” she served concurrently with Catherine as a de facto royal for more than ten years until she, too, got caught up in the tangled politics of Henry’s administration, personified here largely through the person of Cardinal Wolsey, who would himself suffer the king’s wrath; Boleyn, Starkey writes, was as much a religious activist as Catherine, but this time in the service of Reform. Jane Seymour pleased Henry, though she too sympathized with rebels against the crown; alas, she died after giving birth to his long-sought heir. Allies and enemies, Henry’s subsequent wives pressed their various causes, sometimes openly defying his edicts. They were strong women all, Starkey argues in this eminently interesting if sometimes overly detailed chronicle, and all (save Catherine Howard) were politically important figures in their own right.
A boon to fans of English royal history, full of murder and mayhem, but also of solid analysis of a maddeningly complicated era.Pub Date: July 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-694-01043-X
Page Count: 880
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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