An enriching, sympathetic consideration of an extraordinary character in the fraught time of Tudor England.
A new biography of the Englishman who was both celebrated and excoriated in his Tudor era as a model colonizer.
Beloved by Queen Elizabeth, Walter Ralegh (c. 1552-1618) was handsome, dashing, imaginative, and intelligent. In addition, he could write beautiful poetry. “Imagination was a powerful, creative force in his life,” writes Bancroft Prize winner Gallay (Chair, History/Texas Christian Univ.; Colonial and Revolutionary America: Text and Documents, 2017, etc.). Cutting his teeth during the Desmond Rebellions, the Irish attempts to halt Elizabeth’s colonization of the Munster province in Ireland in advance of the certain Spanish invasion, Ralegh showed himself to his queen as the ultimate courtier. His service to Elizabeth was absolute, and in 1584, she “granted [him] a patent to found and possess a colony in America.” Famous for planting a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia—and then abandoning it when war with Spain called him back—Ralegh, as the author ably delineates, was determined to promote a colony far different from the brutally disastrous Spanish model. Ralegh did not believe in enslaving the Native peoples; rather, he worked toward a benevolent, mutually beneficial partnership between the two. Naturally, there was much propaganda involved in this colonizing effort; so too in Ireland, where great circumstantial evidence suggests Ralegh had a significant role in the introduction of the potato crop, brought from America, as well as tobacco. There was also plenty of self-promotion during his search for El Dorado in South America, which was part of his effort to vindicate himself under the new king, James I. Though Gallay is unfortunately not interested in Ralegh’s personal life, he manages to convey the enormous sense of how the gallant courtier, alchemist, humanist, and author helped create the cult of the goddess queen—who summarily ejected him out of her orbit.
An enriching, sympathetic consideration of an extraordinary character in the fraught time of Tudor England.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4579-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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 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
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