An unorthodox yet erudite and elegant biography of this “massive star.”
A fresh attempt to put young, willful Joan the Maid squarely back at the center of the French-English drama of early- to mid-15th-century France.
If readers can wade through the mystifying details of the struggle for supremacy between the Burgundians (allied to the English and King Henry V) and the Armagnacs (devoted to Charles of Valois), a reward awaits when Joan finally appears midway in British author Castor’s (She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, 2010, etc.) historical account. Deciding which side God was on seemed to be the order of the day, and after their humiliating defeat by the English at Agincourt in 1415, the French were hard-pressed to understand why God had chosen the aggressive English invaders to punish them for some unspecified sin. Indeed, Joan was not the first female visionary to appear to advocate for the cause of France. Both Marie Robine (d. 1399) and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé (1331-1414) had broadcast their visions to urge an end to schism. Joan, an illiterate shepherdess at age 16, had left her home village to set out on a mission to speak with the dauphin, housed at Chinon. Her astonishing claims to have been instructed by God to raise an army and drive the English from France so that Charles could be properly crowned required some testing of her integrity, including her virginity. Her adoption of male clothing seemed both an aid in riding and waging war and a way to thwart the sexual advances of men, which plagued her constantly up until her imprisonment. Her victories at Orleans, Jargeau, Patay and Meung, sending the English fleeing in confusion, galvanized the soldiers and townspeople, while her capture at Compiègne suddenly indicated that God had forsaken her. Castor carefully combs the record of her interrogation then and rehabilitation 25 years later.
An unorthodox yet erudite and elegant biography of this “massive star.”Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238439-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
