Another sound feminist resurrection by a seasoned historian.
Though Norman queens were largely unknowable, leave it to this prolific historical biographer to bring them to life.
Having previously tackled the lives of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of France, not to mention the Tudors (The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Margaret Douglas, 2017, etc.), English author and novelist Weir presents five queens of the post–Norman Invasion era who sometimes wielded power in their own right, and not just as queen consort. While the author asserts that her portraits are based on primary material, there is scant little to go by, or what she calls with charming understatement “tantalizing gaps,” because “the deeds of women, unless they were notably pious, politically important, or scandalous, were rarely thought worth recording.” However, in England, the Salic code of the Franks, forbidding succession by or through women, did not apply. Consequently, not only did many kings gain their titles through their female ancestors, but some queens got a shot at ruling, such as Empress Maud (1102-1167), widowed queen of the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V and designated successor of her father, Henry I of England. The first queen Weir portrays is William the Conqueror’s headstrong wife, Matilda of Flanders (1032?-1083), who initially scorned marrying a “bastard.” However, after he roughed her up, she agreed to marry him, saying, “for he must be a man of great courage and high daring who could venture to come and beat me in my own father’s palace.” After their three-decade marriage and long reigns, their son Henry, acceding to the throne after the suspicious death of his older brother, married the controversial Edith of Scotland (renamed Matilda) in order to unite the Norman-Saxon kingdoms in the slow process of integration. Their daughter, Empress Maud, proved a shrewd, and not always well-loved, elder stateswoman. As usual, Weir is meticulous in her research, though the barrage of royal ancestry may deter some American readers.
Another sound feminist resurrection by a seasoned historian.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-96666-2
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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 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
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