Such a compelling subject demands a better telling.
Nell Gwyn, daughter of a boozy, brawling bawd and a missing father, rises to fame on the English stage and to fortune in the court of her lover, King Charles II.
In this uneven debut, Beauclerk, a direct descendent of Gwyn and Charles II (a dull 27-page epilogue charts the three-and-a-half-century Beauclerk history), examines the sometimes sordid lives of his randy Restoration ancestors. Beauclerk does not favor understatement. On the first, page he declares that the relationship between Nell and Charles was “one of the great love stories of our history,” and that it had a “mythic” dimension. He succeeds only moderately in marshaling supporting evidence. There is very little known, for example, about Gwyn’s childhood, and so the author invites us to imagine it along with him. To add flesh to the very few bones he has unearthed, he writes much about the English Civil War, the death of Oliver Cromwell, the Great Fire. Beauclerk describes Restoration playhouses, menus, clothing, houses, medical practices, religious and political conflicts and intrigues. He quotes from Pepys’ diary and scandal sheets and some letters. He offers long summaries of the plays Gwyn appeared in. He tells the stories of Gwyn’s rivals, both on and off the stage. By all accounts, she was a dazzling young actress, a crowd favorite, and her rise from an urchin selling oranges to headliner to bedmate of a sovereign has appeal. The volume of detail increases when Gwyn is picked as one of the King’s official lovers, as court record-keepers charted her possessions, her expenses (she was not a lucky gambler) and her comings and goings. These chapters are the richest. Beauclerk’s style is conversational (most chapters have fewer than ten endnotes), trite at times and even adolescent—there is a naughty pun about “members” standing up in church.
Such a compelling subject demands a better telling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-926-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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
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