Du Maurier began this story with Golden Lads (1975), a study of the young Bacon and his beloved older brother Anthony, ending with Anthony's death in 1601. The present volume follows the mature lawyer, politician, and thinker through the remaining 25 years of his astonishing life. High office had eluded Bacon under Elizabeth; with the accession of James I in 1603 he began his gradual ascent to the Lord Chancellor's woolsack through a succession of lofty legal posts anti convenient friendships with important persons. His rise was curiously intertwined with the ominous issue of royal prerogative and the career of its most stalwart judicial opponent, Bacon's inveterate rival Sir Edward Coke. Attorney-General Bacon and the great Chief Justice of Common Pleas (once rivals for the hand of the same woman) took up opposing—and prophetic—lines of argument as to how far the common law and the judiciary should be servants to the Crown. During the same crowded decades this frail hypochondriac was writing legal works of some importance, revising and expanding his Essays in successive editions, drawing up white papers and propositions for legal reform, and publishing various parts of the encyclopedic scheme he was devising for the restructuring of "philosophy" (i.e., higher learning) in accordance with something like empirical methods. Du Maurier narrates this prodigious career smoothly but glibly, leaving us rather at a loss to account for the Lord Chancellor's stunning (and still controversial) 1621 confession to charges of receiving bribes. Most legal and intellectual issues are digested into trivial pablum, and the frequent coy references to the Shakespearean-authorship question do nothing to reassure anyone of Du Maurier's scholarly judgment. Catherine Drinker Bowen's The Lion and The Throne (1956; a biography of Coke) and Francis Bacon: The Temper of A Man (1963) remain the layman's guides par excellence to this material.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1976
ISBN: 1844080749
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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