No surprises here, but an accessible source for readers who can’t get enough of kings and queens.
After her first venture into fiction (The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette, 2005), Erickson returns to the familiar turf of royal biography (Alexandra, 2001, etc.).
From William of Normandy, who seized the English throne in 1066 and became the formidably galvanizing William I, to the remote Elizabeth II, Erickson covers centuries of British monarchy in knowledgeable, fairly dispassionate brief biographies. She moves chronologically, treating each royal subject where the previous left off (by natural death or murder), filling in necessary parentage and occasionally repeating herself. She introduces each protagonist with an epigraph: an extract from a chronicler or close observer of the throne that throws some light on the royal subject (e.g., Walter Map notes of Henry II [1154–89], “He was impatient of repose, and did not hesitate to disturb half Christendom”). Quotes from Shakespeare appear rather too rarely; few of the epigraphs are as juicy as “I am the scourge of God sent to punish the people of God for their sins,” from Henry V. Erickson apparently is not a Bardolator: She discounts his villainous portrait of Richard III as “fanciful imaginings” and confesses some sympathy for Richard’s last heroic cry of “Treason! Treason!” before being cut down by the invading Tudors. Curiously emphasized here is the fact that England did not tolerate a ruling female monarch until two queens, Jane Grey and Mary Tudor, battled for succession after Edward VI died in 1553. Perhaps due to the medieval Norman law that the property of a married woman became the property of her husband, the only queen who had previously ruled directly was Matilda, vilified for the same imperious qualities admired in her father, Henry I. Erickson’s prose is coolly restrained, though she does express strong opinions. She savages George IV (1820–30) for wallowing in love, gives Victoria only desultory treatment and lets off Edward VIII (The Abdicator) awfully easily.
No surprises here, but an accessible source for readers who can’t get enough of kings and queens.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-31643-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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