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
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
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
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