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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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