Properly accentuates this much-maligned queen’s achievements, but not always convincing when trying to explain away her...
Brisk, learned reassessment of Mary Tudor, whose short reign featured beheadings and burnings, but also political and social reforms for which she has never received proper credit.
A former university lecturer, Porter debuts with a difficult assignment: painting a gentler expression on the grim visage traditionally given to “Bloody Mary.” The author pinpoints several factors in what she sees as a historical injustice. The first is Acts and Monuments, John Foxe’s graphic, wildly popular account of Protestant martyrs’ sufferings during Mary’s attempts to restore England to Roman Catholicism. Centuries of male Protestant historians have tended to follow the general line of Foxe’s book, in print ever since it was first published in 1563. It didn’t help Mary’s reputation that her turbulent years as queen (1553–58) were immediately followed by half-sister Elizabeth’s much longer and admittedly more glorious reign. Porter champions her subject with sturdy determination and fixed focus. She revisits Henry VIII’s long marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother, and the failure to produce a male heir that prompted Katherine’s repudiation and Henry’s break with Rome. She deals with the short reign of Mary’s half-brother Edward VI and examines the mercurial relationship between Mary and Elizabeth. She explores the political marriage between Mary and Philip II of Spain, who did his marital duties but eagerly escaped to the continent whenever he could to avoid his older and not very alluring wife. Porter argues that the queen did not want to restore medieval Catholicism, even though the burnings at the stake of Thomas Cranmer and nearly 300 others suggest the contrary. The author credits Mary for encouraging the arts, insisting on better education for the clergy, initiating some fiscal reforms and being true to the religion whose verities she never questioned.
Properly accentuates this much-maligned queen’s achievements, but not always convincing when trying to explain away her failures.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36837-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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