Weir knows her subject and lends her seemingly inexhaustible interest.
Is there a facet to Henry VIII and his wives that novelist and biographer Weir (Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster, 2009, etc.) hasn’t yet brought to light?
It’s hard to believe, as the author maintains, that there has never been “a book devoted entirely to the fall of Anne Boleyn,” but here we have the sad tale of the isolated, doomed woman. Weir looks at Henry’s growing disenchantment with his second wife; his sense that she lied to him about being virginal at their marriage; his desperation to have an heir after her second miscarriage of a boy; and his susceptibility to the conniving of his ministers, especially Thomas Cromwell. With the death of Katherine of Aragon in 1536, a rapprochement with her nephew Emperor Charles V seemed possible, while other European powers had not considered his three-year marriage to Anne legitimate. She was not popular and had many enemies at court, including the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. A passionate evangelical and reformer, she was held responsible for the “heretical” views of a violently anti-clerical nature and considered by Chapuys to be “more Lutheran than Luther himself.” By May Day, Henry VIII had stopped visiting her, having already taken up with Jane Seymour. Anne’s household was questioned and trumped-up charges of adultery were delivered. Conveyed to the Tower of London, she was charged with seducing five men, including her brother. The case against the queen had to be airtight; as Weir notes, “Henry VIII was to be portrayed as the grievously injured party.” The show trial was open to the public, all the while Anne protested her innocence; she became the first queen of England ever executed. An adept guide through the thickets of evidence, hearsay and apocrypha, Weir considers how later generations came to regard Anne, including her daughter Elizabeth, “the concubine’s little bastard.”
Weir knows her subject and lends her seemingly inexhaustible interest.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-45321-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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