An absorbing narrative that shifts the focus from monarchs to rebels.
A bloody history of treachery and retribution told with zest.
Jordan and Walsh (The King’s Bed: Ambition and Intimacy in the Court of Charles II, 2016, etc.) follow their examination of Charles II’s sexual escapades with a close look at his career after claiming the throne in 1660. Vowing revenge, Charles set out “to chase, pursue, kill and destroy” the 59 men who executed his father. The authors reprise the downfall of Charles I, who ruled tyrannically, incurring the wrath of Parliament, the gentry, and the aristocracy, inciting many to question the legitimacy of the monarchy. Civil wars ensued, resulting in the rise of Oliver Cromwell as “Lord Protector for life.” Cromwell’s reign—he staged his own coronation—infuriated his enemies. When he died in 1658 from malaria (he “had survived myriad battles, intrigues and assassination plots only to be laid low by an insect”), Charles II saw his chance to return from exile. The authors characterize Charles as a cynical pragmatist who handily quashed his opponents, claimed the property and estates of those he identified as threats, and refused any compromise to his royal power. He was not beloved: among his detractors was John Milton, who bitterly condemned a restored monarchy. Edmund Burke derided Charles as “dissolute, false, venal, and destitute of any positive good quality whatsoever.” Still, Burke noted, England yearned for a king, to promote “peace and liberty.” As king, Charles displayed traits “developed over long years of exile and futility”: predilection for philandering, inattentiveness to governing, and laziness. His court was “wonderfully corrupt and licentious.” The authors chronicle the arrest of the regicides and their sensational mass trial, and they focus especially on the lives of 20 fugitives in America and Europe, eluding capture by Charles’s henchmen. The authors praise the “odd coalition” of regicides as “men of principle” who ushered in Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy.
An absorbing narrative that shifts the focus from monarchs to rebels.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-168-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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