A British historian brings to life Queen Matilda’s enormous accomplishments in consolidating early Norman rule.
Alongside her warrior husband, William I, Matilda brought legitimacy, a deeper degree of education, diplomatic savvy and artistic and religious flowering to the shared Norman-English throne. Borman (Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen, 2010, etc.) the chief executive of Britain’s Heritage Education Trust, fleshes out the personality of this fascinating woman, who set the steely precedent for subsequent English female sovereigns by displaying great longevity and stamina in a rough, paternalistic time. The daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, one of the most illustrious houses of Europe, Matilda, apparently diminutive and comely, demonstrated early on her extraordinarily strong will by not only pursuing a suitor on her own, and suffering rejection, but initially rejecting the suit of William of Normandy because he was an illegitimate son of Duke Robert I. Nonetheless, William won her, and their fruitful, long marriage established a powerful, solid dynasty in Normandy before William even cast his eyes covetously across the English Channel. Leaving her as regent to keep Normandy in line—the records show that she was a hands-on, effective ruler—William set out to conquer England. While his methods won few admirers from the English, Matilda proved politically astute, generously endowing monasteries, encouraging cultural integration and ensuring her last son, Henry, was born in England and viewed as its natural heir. Indeed, her fierce loyalty to her sons would prove nettlesome later in the marriage. A richly layered treatment of the stormy reign that yielded the incomparable Bayeux Tapestry and the Domesday Book.
Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-80814-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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