A remarkable—and perhaps treasonous—woman earns her due in a work that will interest a wide range of readers.
A lively bio of the lady-in-waiting who lost her head—almost literally—to Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite privateer.
Was Bess Ralegh, long a footnote in the history of Elizabethan England, “a devious conspirator” or “a foolish woman standing by her man”? In a promising debut, English scholar Beer (Literature/Oxford Univ.) offers a richly detailed portrait of Bess, née Throckmorton, the young woman who braved all manner of trouble as a member of Elizabeth’s court, and for several causes. Not only was her family religiously suspect in a virulently anti-Catholic time, with one cousin accused of being one of “the chief agents of the Queen of Scots” (as indeed he was), but Bess had also risen to Elizabeth’s inner circle of ladies attending her Privy Chamber—and standing so close to Elizabeth’s brilliant fire had burned many before. When Bess found herself swept up by the queen’s captain of the guard, the dashing Walter Ralegh, she was fully aware of the danger attendant in making the ruler jealous. Though Beer allows that Ralegh had plenty of attractive qualities—he was immensely rich, handsome, and charming—she suggests, contrary to other accounts, that young Bess was no unwilling victim of a seducer; she knew without question that she, “whether motivated by ambition or desire, was playing for high stakes by bedding the Queen’s political favorite,” and she did so anyway, mindful of the big payoff that might await. Alas, soon after Walter and Bess wed, he began his slow descent in Elizabeth’s estimation, finally charged with treason (once for having supposedly been in league with the Spanish, later, and then fatally, for having sacked a Spanish garrison in the Caribbean). Against the odds, Bess survived—and, within a few years of Sir Walter’s execution, was working hard not only to rehabilitate his reputation, but also to secure his standing as an “increasingly iconized” national hero, as he has since remained.
A remarkable—and perhaps treasonous—woman earns her due in a work that will interest a wide range of readers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45290-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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
SEEN & HEARD
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