A well-crafted outing for fans of early modern English history or of fiction rooted in scholarly detection and religious...
A tale of doctrinal squabble in the ax-happy England of Henry VIII, from which emerges this important life lesson: never piss off a saint.
He wasn’t a saint then, but Thomas More, author of Utopia and sympathetic hero of A Man for All Seasons, had plenty going for him in his day. He was among the richest and most powerful civil servants in 16th-century England, and for a time he had leave from his king to do pretty much whatever he wanted. One of his favorite hobbies was slaughtering Protestants, writes former London Sunday Times correspondent Moynahan; More “reveled in burnings” and was pleased to put his enemies to “ye fyre ever lastynge.” He conceived a special hatred for a minor cleric named William Tyndale, a gifted linguist and prose stylist. Arguing that English “doth correspond with scripture than ever Latin may,” Tyndale worked for years on a vernacular Bible, which put him at odds with the clerical establishment on a number of counts. The priests considered the Bible and its interpretation their exclusive province; the laity had no business opening its pages or pondering alternative readings, and when they did (as when one unfortunate tailor suggested that Christ didn’t offer his literal body at the Last Supper), they were tortured, burned, or drawn and quartered. Tyndale escaped this dispiriting climate and earned More’s renewed hatred by relocating to Germany and the Low Countries, centers of the Lutheran heresy. The author charges that More arranged for Tyndale’s arrest and subsequent martyrdom in Belgium just before being arrested and executed himself in 1635, having crossed King Henry one time too many. But Tyndale’s legacy endures, Moynahan notes, for the King James Bible incorporates much of his English, including some of its most beautiful passages.
A well-crafted outing for fans of early modern English history or of fiction rooted in scholarly detection and religious intrigue (e.g., The Name of the Rose and the Caedfael mysteries).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31486-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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