Dense at times, but conducted with brio.
The magnificent Benedictine Durham Priory is the protagonist of this latest from historian Moorhouse (Great Harry’s Navy: How Henry VIII Gave England Seapower, 2006, etc.).
The priory serves as a focal point for the author’s elegiac history recounting King Henry VIII’s dissolution of England’s Catholic monasteries. After his break with Rome over the pope’s refusal to countenance his second marriage, the king took over the English church and disbanded hundreds of monastic communities in the 1530s and ’40s. The monks could remain in the religious life, if they accepted Henry’s spiritual leadership, or enter secular society. The dissolution was tremendously disruptive to English society. Monasteries like Durham had been vital centers of their communities, providing jobs, rental housing and crucial supply to, as well as demand for, local food markets. All those services, as well as charitable aid to the poor, were lost when Henry’s henchmen destroyed a monastery—and they destroyed quite a few. Durham survived—it’s the Anglican Durham Cathedral today—and Moorhouse revels in descriptions of its architectural splendor and the monks’ routine. His ladling of details is occasionally excessive, but the author’s gusto for his topic resonates like a Gregorian chant, and he draws his villains in all their outsized venality. Henry was a tyrant who practiced several of the deadly sins, including lust and greed. He hijacked the monasteries for their loot as much as for religious motives, needing to replenish an exchequer drained by his profligacy. Those who refused to cooperate with his makeover of the nation’s spiritual structure went to their deaths. The overseers of Durham capitulated, thus sparing from destruction a breathtaking monument to a past world. Moorhouse celebrates their acquiescence, if not their timidity.
Dense at times, but conducted with brio.Pub Date: April 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-9333461-8-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: BlueBridge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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