An abundantly detailed history from an author steeped in England’s past.
Another story of the relentless striving for power of 16th-century England.
Novelist and biographer of Tudor and Elizabethan royalty, Weir (The Marriage Game: A Novel of Queen Elizabeth I, 2015, etc.) turns to Margaret Douglas (1515-1578), granddaughter of Henry VII, niece of Henry VIII, and wife of Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox. Even as a young woman, Margaret was ambitious, willful, and sometimes reckless, with “an alarming talent for dangerous intrigue” that emerged repeatedly during her tumultuous life. At the age of 20, she was imprisoned and sentenced to death by Henry VIII for the crime of falling in love with the wrong man. The king spared her, but it was not the last time that she was incarcerated in the Tower of London, mostly on charges of treason but once on witchcraft. Besides fearing for her life, Margaret incurred severe debts from these imprisonments, since prisoners had to pay for their upkeep “and any comforts they required” while being held. When Henry VIII died in 1547, the Catholic Margaret was “cast adrift” into a dangerous world ruled by her adversary, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I, whom Weir portrays as vengeful and paranoid. For Margaret and her husband, “a cold draught” emanated from the throne. Elizabeth distrusted Margaret, fearful that a repeal of the Act of Succession could identify the Scottish line as having “prior right to the English succession.” Indeed, Margaret—like other Catholics—did see Elizabeth “as a bastard, a heretic and a usurper.” But with no hope of ousting her, Margaret schemed instead to see her son marry Mary, Queen of Scots, and reign as King of Scotland. Weir provides copious evidence and minute documentation of the betrayals, plots, incendiary gossip, and shifting alliances that characterized Elizabethan England. Excerpts from Margaret’s letters show her to be politically savvy, manipulative, and fierce.
An abundantly detailed history from an author steeped in England’s past.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-52139-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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