A complete, scholarly, and thoroughly readable look at one of the key shapers of the modern world—lavishly illustrated with...
An illuminating and well-written life of the founding figure of the Age of Exploration.
Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460) changed more than the trade routes through his dispatch of ships from Portugal to the coast of Africa and beyond; in some sense, he changed the shape of the world itself. Eager to take best political and economic advantage of Portugal’s ready access to the sea, he founded a school of navigation and shipbuilding at Sagres. There they soon developed the caravel—an exceptionally sturdy vessel capable of far longer and more far-flung voyages than had yet been common. It was the type of ship Columbus would later sail when he discovered the New World, and it went a long way toward establishing Portugal as one of the preeminent sea powers of the age. Russell (Spanish Studies/Oxford Univ.) creates a well-rounded portrait of the Prince by making use of a staggering variety of sources. He goes beyond the details of Henry’s life to looks at the consequences of his reign—including the opening of the slave trade. The author also looks at the less momentous aspects of Henry’s legacy (such as the introduction of winemaking to the island of Madeira and the village of Oporto). He pays significant attention to the spread of Islam during this period, as this threatened Portugal and served as an impetus for Henry’s explorations (insofar as he needed to ascertain the extent of Islamic influence in the region).
A complete, scholarly, and thoroughly readable look at one of the key shapers of the modern world—lavishly illustrated with period maps and paintings.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08233-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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