A sad tale drawn out and viewed through rose-colored glasses.
An initially inspired juxtaposition of the lives of the two Spanish sister queens grows saccharine in the hands of British historical researcher Fox (Jane Boleyn, 2007).
The daughters of Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon were positioned at a very young age to marry the most illustrious monarchs of Europe and inherit enormous power in their own right. Yet both were outmaneuvered by the men around them—father, husbands, son—and both eventually squandered and lost their power, dying in shame and isolation. Fox fashions a sympathetic, storybook narrative of the two sisters, daughters of strong monarchs, especially their mother, who spearheaded the Reconquista of 1492. The girls were educated in Latin and married off in their mid-teens, Juana to Philip of Burgundy, and Katherine to Arthur, Henry VII of England’s eldest son. Fate intervened swiftly and changed the course of history: A series of deaths of her older siblings left Juana in the position of inheriting her parents’ kingdom, while her new husband began systematically to rob her of her authority, casting doubt about her sanity; in England, Arthur’s death left Katherine vulnerable until finally she was wedded by his brother Henry VIII and made queen—temporarily. Juana, for her part, despite her sovereignty and the many children she would bear her husband, was essentially disinherited from and then imprisoned first by her father, Ferdinand, then her own son, Carlos V, for the remaining 46 years of her life. Was she truly mad or deliberately enfeebled in the power struggle? Her sister Katherine, more politically astute, had acted as Henry VIII’s equal, until her inability to provide a male heir prompted him to divorce her and she was forced to acquiesce. Fox takes the side of the ill-fated sisters, but she does not offer any new light through the murky historical record.
A sad tale drawn out and viewed through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-51604-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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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