The first major biography of the early English explorer since William McFee’s widely purchased 1928 Life of Sir Martin Frobisher.
Frobisher, a “semi-literate” man with “no skills, prospects or other faculty to recommend him,” failed early on at conventional merchant trading and, despite his modern reputation as a hero and explorer, actually spent the majority of his life in a different profession: “privateering” (i.e., the state-sanctioned theft of other nations’ trading vessels and cargoes). In his late 30s, however, Frobisher managed to reinvent himself as a visionary explorer, making two trips to the New World in search of the (nonexistent) Northwest Passage. In spite of his failure, Frobisher’s reputation as a sea captain grew, and for the rest of his life he was repeatedly called on to assist in England’s maritime offensives. He was ultimately made an Admiral of the Royal Navy, and suffered a mortal wound while leading a charge on a Spanish fort. McDermott argues that Frobisher’s character flaws were often his best asset and that his arrogance, unscrupulousness, and single-minded fearlessness saved him more than once where more balanced men would have fallen prey to equivocation. His cold-heartedness served him poorly, though, in the end: having failed utterly to provide for his first wife and children (who died in a poorhouse after he abandoned them), his second marriage produced no children and his hard-won estate was quickly squandered after his death.
Intriguing if long-winded. (4 b&w maps and charts)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08380-7
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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