A widely vilified queen receives a well-researched, mostly admiring biography.
Powerful women were a striking feature of 16th-century Europe, and this evocative biography paints a vivid portrait of a prime example.
Hollingsworth, a scholar of the Italian Renaissance and author of The Family Medici and The Borgias, emphasizes that Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589) was born a significant figure as the only legitimate child of Lorenzo II, ruler of Florence. Her uncle was pope, and other Medicis were cardinals, generals, and political figures in the many duchies, republics, and fiefdoms that made up Italy. The author skillfully keeps track of a huge cast of characters as she describes Catherine’s odyssey. Married to French king Francis I’s second son, Henry II, she left Italy and led a life of royal luxury until the first son and then Francis died; after her husband died, she became queen from 1547 until 1559. With three young sons who eventually succeeded their father, Catherine was thrust into the limelight as regent and remained a formidable presence for the next 30 years. The reformation was well underway in 1559, but within a few years, France descended into a barbaric civil war that lasted until the century’s end. During its course, many French leaders urged toleration between Catholics and Protestants, but leaders who proclaimed that compromise was for weak-willed individuals found a more eager audience. Catherine was a compromiser, hated by extremists on both sides, and in the chaos of the following decades, there was no risk in blaming her for the unspeakable atrocities that occurred regularly. With diversions into her generous patronage of the arts and architecture, Hollingsworth concentrates on dynastic politics and France’s gruesome religious war. Months before the murder of her third son, Henry III, she died. Her son-in-law became king and ultimately ended the war.
A widely vilified queen receives a well-researched, mostly admiring biography.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781639367016
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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