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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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