A trek along a familiar trail conducted by a personable, able guide.
The Madrid correspondent for the Guardian follows the sad, tragic life of Catherine, first wife of Henry VIII, from her native Spain into the bloody whirlwind of Tudor England.
Tremlett (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past, 2007) begins with a question still dividing historians: Did Catherine consummate her brief marriage to Henry’s short-lived older brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales? All Henry’s legal efforts to invalidate his marriage were based on his contention that the marriage had been consummated, something Catherine vigorously denied the rest of her life. Initially, the author focuses on the Spanish side of the story, looking carefully at Catherine’s roots. Once she arrived in England, however, and once Henry’s court began to fracture over the issue, Tremlett must rely on the same biased witnesses and documents used by Catherine’s many previous biographers. Consequently, there’s not much new here, but a slightly different slant, perhaps a more compassionate heart. Tremlett’s journalistic chops are in evidence, however, and the well-written narrative moves briskly, if inevitably, through the wedding, the early years of marriage—we learn a lot about Tudor food and clothing and customs—the extraordinarily difficult childbirth experiences of Catherine, the healthy birth and, finally, Mary (who later became England’s Queen “Bloody” Mary Tudor). The author chronicles Henry’s occasional infidelities and his blinding, corrosive passion for Anne Boleyn, which, in part, accelerated the English Reformation and for decades splashed the blood of martyrs across the countryside. Tremlett credits Catherine for not encouraging a Spanish invasion to save her and Roman Catholicism..
A trek along a familiar trail conducted by a personable, able guide.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7916-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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 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
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