An intelligent author gracefully feeds readers a great deal of complicated dynastic information in a most palatable fashion.
Scottish writer and producer Graham (BBC’s Elizabeth) delivers a robust, evenhanded life of Elizabeth I’s Catholic cousin and eventual betrayer.
The author clearly has little sympathy for pampered Mary Stuart (1542–87), who lacked her older cousin’s masculine education, not to mention Elizabeth’s shrewd political instincts, and relied instead on her charming good looks to manipulate men. (Graham calls Mary “one of the great weepers of history.”) Early on, Mary was treated as a pawn by the Guises, her mother’s aristocratic French family, who controlled the Scottish throne she inherited from her father, James V, when she was six days old. The Guises arranged Mary’s upbringing at the French court of Henri II and her betrothal at age four to his son and heir. Raised under the wily blandishments of Henri’s beautiful mistress, Diane de Poitiers, Mary was steeped in Catholicism and courtly romances. Her 1558 marriage to the unstable, sickly Dauphin (who became king a year later) ended with his untimely death in 1560. She was returned to Scotland at age 18 mostly because no one knew what to do with her, an unfortunate theme throughout her life. Mary provoked her own expulsion from her native country and throne with her two subsequent marriages. She was implicated in the assassination of Lord Darnley, father of her only child, the future James VI, and later compromised by the ambitious machinations of the adulterous Lord Bothwell. Facing imprisonment in Scotland, the “whore queen” threw herself on the mercy of her reluctant cousin. During the next 20 years, her shelter in England gradually grew into a stricter imprisonment as the spy network of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s closest advisor, intercepted Mary’s treasonous letters seeking help among Catholic factions and even from England’s archenemy, Philip II of Spain. Despite his occasional exasperation with his subject, Graham is a knowledgeable guide to the tricky terrains of Scottish and British history in the 16th century.
An intelligent author gracefully feeds readers a great deal of complicated dynastic information in a most palatable fashion.Pub Date: July 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-049-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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