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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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