First published in Great Britain in 1992, The Reckoning brilliantly re-creates the dark underworld of Elizabethan spies and conspiracies that enmeshed the 29-year-old poet/playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was stabbed through the eye allegedly as a result of in a brawl over his bill at Widow Bull's house in Deptford. Charles Nicholl is less interested in the poet's texts than in ``the reports of snoops and spies, in Privy Council papers and criminal charge-sheets.... This all happened a long time ago, but I believe it was a case of murder.... We can dig away some of the lies, and perhaps find beneath them a faint preserved outline where the truth once lay.'' Marlowe (1564-93) was killed after spending a day at Bull's with three nasty gents: Ingram Frizer, a crafty loan shark who did the actual stabbing and was acquitted for it; Frizer's dupe, Nicholas Skeres, who seems to have been a government intelligence agent in the pay of the Earl of Essex; and Robert Poley, a sinister, complex double-dealer, informer, agent provocateur and rumored poisoner, called by some ``the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld.'' Nicholl takes as a red herring an imputation by informer Richard Baines that Marlowe was gay, adding that we ``do not know what it meant to be gay in Elizabethan England.'' Baines also accused Marlowe of counterfeiting, of spreading heresies, atheism, and the slander that Christ was a sodomite with St. John, adding that Marlowe—a danger to Christianity—should have his mouth stopped. And Marlowe's dying of plague—another red herring? After carrying us through factions, fictions, and knaveries, Nicholl gives his vision of the murder. The vision is swathed in gauze and sultry with wine, but it sounds plausible and addresses the dark political context leading back to Her Majesty's Privy Council. A fine job of research that could quash forever the myth that Marlowe died in a ``tavern brawl.''
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-175981-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
The world didn't lose a great journalist when Gloria Steinem focused her energies on feminist activism—but because she was a working journalist (and, from 1968, political columnist for first-person-prone New York magazine), the light bulb goes on right here. This first collection of her writings (also, her first book) leads off with autobiographical comments: on the speaking she's done instead of writing, and how difficult ("a major hurdle in my life") and ultimately rewarding it was (kudos on both scores to her black lecture partners); on her earlier writing career, or the frustrations of frivolous, "girl reporter" assignments; on her first stabs at "telling the truth in public" and other outcomes of a "growing consciousness." From the pre-feminist writing, she includes only "I Was a Playboy Bunny"—a 1963 "exposÉ" of the crippling grind, the miserable pay, the sexual harassment (said a co-worker: "If you can type, what the hell do you want to be a Bunny for?")—and the first parts of a section of campaign reports, 1965-72. It's there, in 1968, that the "Feminist Realization" (born of covering women's meetings) hits home—eliciting the kind of protest that would quickly become a groundswell: "Six months ago I would have been honored by McGovern's invitation to a 'serious' (i.e., male and therefore grownup) political meeting, but full of doubt about whether I could contribute in a 'serious' (male) way. . . . I couldn't admit that any power relationship in life is political: therefore politics for women may be who's doing the dishes, or who's getting paid half the wages that a man would get for the same job, or who's expected to take the roles of service and support everywhere, including in political campaigns." A dozen pages later, after the 1972 Democratic Convention (Chisholm for president, Farenthold for V.P.): "Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers, or mindless policy-makers. . . ." That sense of being in at the creation is diluted by the non-chronological arrangement of the pieces in the remaining two-thirds of the book—pieces that are essentially feminist polemics whether the subject is food (women's smaller share or "Erotica vs. Pornography," (good) Jackie Kennedy or the (bad) heroine of Sophie's Choice. A partial exception is "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)," Steinem's previously unpublished memoir of her mentally-disturbed mother—whom she regards as a victim but also celebrates as a life-force. Still, her particular talent has been for perceiving the feminist angle, in her own writing and for Ms., and spreading that recognition. If some of the ideas here sound hackneyed, she has honest claim to them.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0452257107
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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