Readers with a low toleration for outrage will have a difficult time, but most will find this a satisfying series of...
A portrait of “the diverse lives enjoyed—or endured—by women living in Tudor England, and together constituting a multifaceted impression of female humanity of the period.”
British historian Norton (The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor: Elizabeth I, Thomas Seymour, and the Making of a Virgin Queen, 2015) delivers less a social history than a well-researched description of the lives of women in 16th-century Britain. Inevitably, archival documents emphasize rulers, the rich, and the lurid, so Norton has much to say about royalty, aristocrats, female entrepreneurs, criminals, and martyrs. Readers may squirm to learn how badly Tudor law, religion, and custom treated women; almost every woman accepted this, and only a small number prospered. The author has a predilection for namesakes, so she recounts the royal nursery routine of Elizabeth Tudor. Little of Queen Elizabeth I’s life was hidden, but readers will learn perhaps more than they want to know about her relentless rejection of suitors and struggles against aging. Elizabeth Boleyn reached the top of the greasy pole of court politics, surviving even the infamous beheading of her daughter, Anne. Elizabeth Barton, the “Nun of Kent,” was wildly popular in a time when religion was a matter of life and death. For almost a decade, she heard the voice of God until her execution by Henry VIII; her pronouncements opposed his wishes. Those in search of a genuine social history of this era should turn to Ian Mortimer’s A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England (2017). Norton occasionally digresses into subjects like Tudor diet, hygiene, and morals, but mostly she writes minibiographies of women who struggled with varying degrees of success in an unjust man’s world.
Readers with a low toleration for outrage will have a difficult time, but most will find this a satisfying series of historical vignettes.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-440-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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