A penetrating, spirited recounting of a courtier’s roiling life and times.
A new biography of Sir Walter Ralegh (c. 1554-1618), a handsome, wily, politically astute, and powerful figure in Elizabethan England.
Beer (Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, 2016, etc.) creates a sharp, sympathetic, and discerning portrait of a charming man of “dark, Celtic, good looks” who became a favorite of Elizabeth I only to fall precipitously from grace under the queen’s successor, James VI of Scotland. Without a noble background, Ralegh’s unlikely rise to prominence was fueled by his “energy, vision and intelligence” mixed with “arrogance, violence and deception.” An improbable naval hero (he could not sleep onboard ship, he claimed), he survived sea battles; a womanizer, who married in secret without the queen’s approval, he rose above sex scandals. He was a “cultural relativist in a century of religious absolutism” and a “poster boy” for “a more decent form of British imperialism, concerned not with “trade and plunder” but with settlement. For a time, his loyalty to Elizabeth ensured that he would survive the rivalries that rent the fabric of the court; in 1584, he gained a coveted patent “to discover unknown lands, to take possession of them in the Queen’s name, and to hold them for six years.” His plan to found the colony of Virginia was, Beer acknowledges, “only a tiny part of a larger geo-political struggle; Protestant England’s war with Catholic Spain”—the adversary nation that Ralegh hated vehemently. The author is forthright about her subject’s failings and clear in her admiration, as well, especially for his talent for rhetoric: “He was the master of persuasion, a man who could make you believe that defeat was victory, that black was white.” In 1592, imprisoned by Elizabeth, he bribed his way to freedom; two years later, he was “a freewheeling adventurer” once again, in South America on a quest for gold. After Elizabeth died, he became “a small cog in the very large machine of international power politics,” imprisoned, condemned, and beheaded.
A penetrating, spirited recounting of a courtier’s roiling life and times.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-434-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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