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 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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