A scholarly and comprehensive biography that reconsiders the reputation of King Philip II of Spain (152798). As ruler of the most extensive empire the world had yet seen, Philip II has always been studied exclusively in terms of the political events and foreign policy of his reign. Kamen (Higher Council for Scientific Research, Spain) now offers the first true biography of Philip. The historian draws on new manuscript sources, including Philip's unpublished correspondence, and he emphasizes the part played by the New World in forming Philip's outlook. Emerging from a solitary childhood, which was overshadowed by his remote father, Emperor Charles V, the young Philip was a cultured Renaissance prince: He patronized Titian, took part in medieval jousts, and was caught up in the contemporary nostalgia for chivalry and the legends of King Arthur. His life, however, was to be dominated and shaped by serious problems, mainly springing from the convulsions caused in Europe by the Reformation and by his need as monarch to assert some measure of central control in Spain itself. Kamen explores, for example, the conflicts behind Philip's disastrous policy in the Netherlands and his brief dynastic marriage with England's Queen Mary, his attempt to invade England during the reign of Mary's Protestant successor, Elizabeth, and his interventions to protect the native populations from rapacious colonists in Spanish South America. While Kamen avoids easy revisionism, his Philip comes across as a dutiful and complex man whose freedom was paradoxically limited by his destiny. Deeply religious rather than fanatical, Philip supported the Spanish Inquisition as a matter of course but refused to attack the Jewish Conversos. His present black image, Kamen argues, can be traced to English and Dutch propaganda in the 1580s. Essential reading for all students of the turbulent 16th century. (32 illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-07081-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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