Thoroughly researched and entertaining, filled with delicious details for general readers and provocative argument for...
A detailed journey through the court and life of Henry VIII.
Popular historians have generally portrayed Henry VIII rather more two-dimensionally than did Holbein, viewing him (by and large) as a decadent libertine who killed his wives when he tired of them. Weir (Eleanor of Aquitaine, 2000, etc.), however, is out to change our perspective. She draws upon many years of research and her own very wide reading of English history in offering a rather different take on this highly disreputable man. The first third of her study concentrates on court life in the Tudor era, in which the author is able to point to many aspects of Henry’s personality (especially his rampant womanizing) as behavior typical of the English nobility of the period. In other regards, though, Henry was an anomaly: Originally destined for the Church (his elder brother Arthur, who died young, was expected to inherit the crown), he was well-educated at a time when many European monarchs were illiterate, and he became a great patron of the arts. Many of the more brilliant figures in his Court (such as Thomas More and Erasmus) helped to establish England as a center of learning for the first time in its history. Yet for all of Henry’s very real accomplishments as a statesman, there was a cold and calculating side to him that eventually transformed this striking and (in many ways) brilliant man into one of the most self-indulgent tyrants England has ever seen. In the end, although he may not have been the notorious villain of legend, Henry VIII was a pathetic figure.
Thoroughly researched and entertaining, filled with delicious details for general readers and provocative argument for students of the period.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43659-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
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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