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
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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