A perfect choice for readers who love English history, especially the Stuart period.
A history of a regicide plot against James I (1566-1625).
Though the book may seem like just another history of an English king, Woolley (Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America, 2007, etc.) packs the narrative with the kind of interesting tidbits that textbooks often leave out. James I was England’s first Stuart king, succeeding his cousin Elizabeth I. His childhood in Scotland was poor and often threatened, so to suddenly become king was a pleasant shock. He always had a weakness for favorites, beginning in his youth with this cousin Esmé Stuart. Robert Carr enjoyed James’ favor until the king took notice of a young cupbearer, George Villiers. A group formed at Bayard’s Castle worked hard to find George a position for the king, little knowing they were giving up the devil they knew for one much worse. Mentored by Francis Bacon, George became the king’s emotional, political, and sexual friend. James gifted countless positions, lands, and titles to George. As James’ son, Charles, grew to adulthood, the rivalry between him and George looked like it was going to cause trouble, but the king ended up the loser in that relationship. It was George who accompanied Charles in his secret adventure to woo the Spanish princess. The match of Catholic Spain to strongly Protestant England was unpopular at best. The Spanish support for its allies' seizing the Palatinate from James’ son was sufficient enough to provoke war. The adventure was a complete failure, though, as Charles was discovered. The wedding never took place, but the ties between George and Charles were fixed. The author notes how the pair excluded the king, who ignored his duties and became resentful, paranoid, hostile, and awkward toward them. The king’s death from malaria was always thought to be natural, but Woolley has an entirely new, riveting tale to tell.
A perfect choice for readers who love English history, especially the Stuart period.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12503-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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