Dense with material and flavor of the epoch.
An intimate biography of Henry VIII’s fifth queen: vivacious young woman who only wanted to have fun or a tragic victim of abusive elders?
In his largely sympathetic portrait of Catherine Howard (1523-1542), whose youthful flirtations spelled her downfall, Irish playwright and historian Russell (The Emperors: How Europe's Rulers Were Destroyed by the First World War, 2014, etc.) renders a fully fleshed portrait of Howard based around the details of her household and intimates. Indeed, the author’s study is so intricately woven in contextual detail that he often fails to see the forest for the trees—e.g., what were Catherine’s true motivations; was she just a flimsy bystander to her own fate? Her pampered upbringing as a noblewoman (granddaughter to Thomas Howard, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk) and sense of natural entitlement did not shield her from her father’s habitual indebtedness, and she received little in the way of formal education. Catherine was a ward of her rich aunt Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and her teenage years were dotted with infatuations—e.g., with her music teacher, Henry Manox, and her aunt’s secretary, Francis Dereham. Russell sifts carefully through the evidence and dismisses the explanation of sexual abuse, as clearly Catherine was in love, especially with Dereham and later, as queen, with Thomas Culpeper, a handsome favorite of her husband. Her 16-month stint as queen revealed “the Henrician court in its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset,” when Henry had just divorced Anne of Cleves because he disliked her and impulsively married the charming Catherine on the day Thomas Cromwell was executed, July 28, 1540. Perhaps the marriage was engineered by her uncle Norfolk, who had grown jealous and suspicious of the former Protestant chief minister. Russell’s portrait effectively underscores the machinations of this volatile court, the treachery of sycophants, and the importance of the all-seeing servants.
Dense with material and flavor of the epoch.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0863-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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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