A highly detailed narrative of 15th-century England's complex dynastic struggles, from their origins in the reign of Edward III to the murder of Henry VI in 1471. From 1455 until Henry Tudor's victory over Richard II at Bosworth Field in 1485, England was rocked by a series of battles for the throne, known as the Wars of the Roses. These battles destabilized the old medieval order and so helped bring about the strong central government of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in the following century. Having already dealt with the second half of these wars in The Princes in the Tower (1994), Weir now goes back to the struggles between the House of Lancaster, in the person of the saintly but mentally ill Henry VI, and the House of York, led first by Richard Plantagenet and then by his son, who eventually seized the throne as Edward IV. Weir describes the many personalities in rich detail. We learn of King Henry's yearlong descent into catatonic schizophrenia and of the struggle between Henry's queen, Margaret of Anjou, and Richard Plantagenet to take over the afflicted king's duties. We read of ancient families and powerful magnates, like Somerset, Suffolk, and above all the Earl of Warwick, known as the King Maker, who eventually changed sides and secured Henry's brief restoration in 1470. Throughout the story Margaret of Anjou stands out as the power behind her unworldly husband; in the end it is she, with her phenomenal energy, who raises political and military support for his increasingly hopeless cause. Weir's work is well researched and her British style is powerful and elegant, but she tends to pile fact upon fact relentlessly, so that nonexperts will easily get lost in her dense narrative. A complicated story brilliantly told, but with few concessions to the general reader. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39117-9
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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