A great book for history fans seeking illumination on the connections of European royalty.
The story of how one remarkable woman’s drive to survive secured the succession of the British crown to this day.
Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662), daughter of King James I, was 6 years old when her father, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded Queen Elizabeth I as the king of England. Elizabeth was married to Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, a marriage many considered to be beneath her royal status. The reasoning behind the marriage was that James I would support Frederick’s claim to become king of Bohemia. In his usual manner, it was a claim that James promised but never delivered. The Bohemian revolt of 1618 brought an offer to Frederick to assume the throne, which he quickly did. Unfortunately, the Hapsburgs and Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand took umbrage and quickly recovered the kingdom. Frederick and Elizabeth ruled for only one season, thus the title of Winter King and Queen. Living at the court of the Prince of Orange, they struggled to regain their titles. Fortunately, the Prince of Orange left Elizabeth a significant piece of the West India Company, which contributed to a new army to regain Frederick’s realm. However, it was not to be, and then came the Thirty Years’ War, which precipitated Frederick’s death in 1632. Though the narrative could have devolved into a complicated morass of intertwined royal families, Goldstone (The Rival Queens: Catherine de' Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, 2016, etc.), a seasoned historian, effectively keeps the lines clear as she relates Elizabeth’s repeated, frustrated attempts to secure strong marriages for her children under trying circumstances. Her children’s stories are fascinating, as well—e.g., one daughter had a long correspondence with Descartes, another with Leibniz. Ultimately, it was her youngest daughter, Sophia, who secured the family’s future as the Electress of Hanover.
A great book for history fans seeking illumination on the connections of European royalty.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-38791-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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