Colorful period details (Mary introduced chintz and blue china) and vivid portraits of legendary figures like the great Duke...
Densely detailed biographies of the Protestant sisters who betrayed their Catholic father James to become queens of England.
Unnecessarily repetitive as she initially describes in extensive outline events and figures later repeated in more closely examined sections, British historian Waller (1700: Scenes from London Life, 2000, etc.) nonetheless tells a stirring and important story. Important, because it reminds us that 17th-century Europe too was plagued by seemingly intractable religious differences: conflict between Protestants and Catholics caused the devastating Thirty Year’s War, ended religious toleration in France (where the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685), and brought exile for England’s Catholic King James II. Waller begins with the birth in 1688 of a healthy son to James and his second wife. Fearing that this birth secured the monarchy and the country for Catholicism, English Protestants invited James’ elder daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange, to invade England and become King and Queen. The author then circles back to tell the story of James’s first wife, mother of Mary and Anne, his second marriage to an Italian princess, and his flight to France. James was a loving father, but his devoutly Anglican daughters became alarmed as they saw him working to restore Catholic domination. Anne, married to a Danish prince, deliberately passed on rumors that her father’s baby was not his own and that the queen had never been pregnant. James fled, deeply hurt by the treachery of his offspring. Mary became a much loved figure during her brief reign, Anne succeeded her in 1694, and upon Anne’s death in 1714, the English crown passed to James I’s German (and Protestant) great-grandson, George I. The daughters’ actions ultimately secured the throne for Anglicanism, prevented civil war, and strengthened parliamentary democracy.
Colorful period details (Mary introduced chintz and blue china) and vivid portraits of legendary figures like the great Duke of Marlborough: lively, instructive history.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30711-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
