A fresh history that profits from its psychological insights.
A biography of a manic-depressive, but surprisingly successful, king.
Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition, 1998, etc.) presents an absorbing tale of the first Spanish king from the Bourbon line, which rules the country today. He focuses on three aspects of Philip’s reign: his state policies, his family concerns, and his psychological problems. On the domestic front, taking the cue from his grandfather, Louis XIV of France, Philip reformed Spain’s antiquated structure of government, streamlining tax collection and tightening the political bonds between the various Iberian kingdoms and Madrid. Unfortunately, however, the gains from these reforms were squandered by Philip’s belligerent foreign policies, which led to the War of Spanish Succession (a short-lived invasion of Sardinia) and other devastating mishaps. The author paints Philip as a cosmopolitan in an inward-looking court. He eschewed Spanish nobles’ advice, kept French and later Italian counselors, and was often totally dependent on the two wives he had over the course of his 46-year reign. This last point surfaces because, Kamen argues, Philip had bipolar disorder. During low periods he refused to wash and spent months sleeping by day and conducting official business in the middle of the night, sometimes refusing to talk so that his queens had to speak for him. During high periods, on the other hand, especially during wartime, he was the consummate leader. These episodes contributed to Philip’s decision to abdicate, a chapter of the king’s life Kamen could have examined more closely and at more length. Philip’s son died shortly after being installed, however, and the father returned to the throne. Despite the ill fit between king and kingdom, Kamen argues that Philip made Spain’s first moves towards becoming a modern state. The foreign art and architecture he brought into the country revitalized the Spanish court. Even his failed military enterprises had an upside: by committing Spanish troops (successfully or not) to European campaigns, Philip forced the other powers to take his country more seriously.
A fresh history that profits from its psychological insights.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08718-7
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
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