The methods of a Mafia boss characterized the career of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who in the 15th century briefly ruled England as Richard III. Here, Weir (The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 1992) throws new light on this horror story—and especially on the mysterious disappearance of the two boys who stood in Richard's way. In the 15th century, the succession to the English throne was never stable. A crisis occurred when the saintly Henry VI had a nervous breakdown and was ousted in 1465 by Edward IV. Henry was confined in the Tower of London, part of which was a royal palace, and eventually he was murdered there on Edward's orders, probably by Edward's youngest brother, Richard of Gloucester. When, in 1483, Edward died prematurely, Richard seized power as Lord Protector of the Realm, since the heir apparent, Edward V, was only 13 years old. Within weeks, Richard coerced Parliament into declaring him king on the supposed grounds that the late king's marriage had been invalid. Edward V and his brother, the ten-year old Richard, Duke of York, were removed to the Tower of London, never to be seen again, and most people assumed that Richard had ordered the princes murdered. Richard's former allies began to plot against him—but the monarch died in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth. Here, Weir relates these many intrigues and political executions in a highly readable, brisk manner that's at once vivid and scholarly. She makes special use of older accounts written by Dominic Mancini, the Croyland Chroniclers, and St. Thomas More, and she emphasizes the role of Edward IV's queen and her ambitious family. Above all, Weir argues her way convincingly through recent scholarship and the ongoing debate as to the princes' fate and Richard's role in it. (A genealogical table is provided.) A fascinating historical whodunit in which truth is more sordid than fiction. (Eight pages of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38372-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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