Henry eventually assumed control of his realm, but it was too little, too late. Tudor fans will enjoy this outside-in...
Bringing to light the dangers of life in the service of Henry VIII.
As Borman (Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, 2016, etc.), England’s joint chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces and chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust, shows, Henry was a complex figure: fiercely loyal, treacherously fickle, short-tempered, demanding, and self-absorbed. Ascending the throne at a young age, he had little time for the duties of a king and was more inclined to frolicking with friends and leaving official affairs to ministers. The first of these was Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal and ambitious genius with a flexible conscience. As with many of Henry’s favorites, Wolsey was also low-born. He encouraged Henry’s extravagant lifestyle and easily manipulated the foolish youngster. Wolsey lasted through the annulment crisis and marriage to Anne Boleyn, but he was the first of many to fall. Then, Thomas Cromwell stepped in and used his considerable legal talents to secure Henry’s will. Afterward, it was Anne who engineered a divide between Cromwell and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer over the dissolution of the monasteries. Eventually, Cromwell dominated both the political and spiritual affairs of the king. Thomas More was another highly intelligent servant to the king, but he could not support the king’s “great matter” of succession and was beheaded. Cranmer was one of the few who supported the king in all his whims and demands, generally keeping his own council. He was one of the few who survived the king’s whims only to die on Queen Mary’s orders. Henry’s penchant to favor the low-born reflected his ever increasing paranoia. They would never have an eye on seizing the crown, so Henry favored ability over nobility, and the noble-born worked tirelessly to undermine those favorites. Borman skillfully shows Henry maneuvering his men like chess pieces; when they opposed him, they suffered violent downfalls.
Henry eventually assumed control of his realm, but it was too little, too late. Tudor fans will enjoy this outside-in biography as a different view of a complicated monarch.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2843-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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