Anne’s natural reserve and her instinct for discretion has led historians to believe that she was weak and dominated by...
Somerset (The Affair of the Poisons: Murder, Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV, 2004) delivers an exhaustive and easily readable history of a queen trying to emulate Elizabeth I with none of the Tudor forcefulness and too much of the Stuart feebleness.
The much-maligned Queen Anne (1665–1714) was never expected to reign. Her father, James II, was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and succeeded by his daughter, the childless Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. Anne’s 17 pregnancies before her accession produced only one child, who survived only to age 11. Her devotion to her friend and First Lady of the Bedchamber, Sarah Churchill, was a most unfortunate liaison. Sarah treated Anne as an uninformed fool, unable to form opinions of her own. However, Anne blossomed when she became queen, a situation that Sarah never accepted. Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough, and Lord Treasurer Sidney Godolphin, were Anne’s primary ministers; many thought they completely controlled her. Anne’s correspondence shows just how malicious and even criminal Sarah was. Her dictatorial domination is evident in her demands, harangues and diatribes. Even Marlborough phrased his letters to the queen based on instructions from his wife and Godolphin. They viciously abused Anne’s rejection of their politics while encouraging the future George I to invade England after they fell from favor. Today’s reader will easily recognize the rancorous party politics, obstructionism and inability to enact laws that existed in that period.
Anne’s natural reserve and her instinct for discretion has led historians to believe that she was weak and dominated by women of stronger character. Somerset’s impressive scholarship debunks that belief and shows Anne as a masterful, even authoritative, queen who survived the influence of her “friends.”Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-96288-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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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