A fine blending of the personal and the political.
A polished biography that illuminates the life and reign of Anne Stuart (1665-1714), queen of England.
Independent historian Cromwell (Florence Nightingale, Feminist, 2013, etc.) makes a convincing case for Queen Anne’s shrewdness at navigating the political extremes of her time, calling her the “least known and most underrated” of England’s female monarchs. Her father, King James II, was a Catholic who tried to pack Parliament with like-minded thinkers, but Anne resisted conversion attempts and remained a Protestant. In a highly polarized atmosphere, she formed a government, Cromwell notes, made up of moderate Whigs and Tories. After the reign of the Dutch-born William of Orange (who’d married Anne’s sister, Mary), Anne, who married the Danish Prince George, “felt she must restore Englishness to the crown.” The Duke of Marlborough was one of her key advisers during a war against France, and his wife, Sarah Churchill, was her particular friend. Cromwell pinpoints the three main issues of Anne’s reign from 1702 to her death in 1714: war and domestic political strife; physical struggles, including painful gout and numerous miscarriages; and a troubled relationship with Sarah, whom Mary thought of as “Anne’s evil genius.” While estranged from Anne, Sarah spread rumors about Anne’s supposed dalliances with women—and about the attention that the queen paid to Anne’s favorite servant, Abigail Masham. Cromwell refutes this, citing Anne’s letters to Sarah as proof of “passionate platonic love between women,” but she fully explores the continuing controversy over Abigail’s place at court. The book is thus well timed to capitalize on the recent success of the award-winning 2018 film The Favourite, which portrays Anne in a different way. The author’s scene-setting comments about the weather don’t always ring true (“a frivolous little breeze blew over London”), but her details regarding royal food, clothing, and gardens are vivid and sumptuous. A good number of quotes are taken from primary sources and supply the flavor of period speech. The intricacies of Whig and Tory machinations threaten to become tedious, but Cromwell wisely keeps the focus on the “extremely popular” monarch.
A fine blending of the personal and the political.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4766-7681-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
