A thorough, engaging work whose arguments would prove more persuasive were we not living in an era of such fierce...
The author of A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (2005) chronicles the emergence of doubts about the playwright’s identity and speculates about the assumptions and motives of the principal doubters.
Shapiro (English/Columbia Univ.) is convinced that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays, but he waits until the penultimate chapter to summarize his evidence. The author’s generally dispassionate, scholarly treatment will convince few doubters, for as he notes, “[p]ositions are fixed and debate has proved to be futile or self-serving.” Shapiro begins with an account of a late-18th-century fraud perpetrated by William-Henry Ireland, who forged documents in Shakespeare’s hand, including the manuscript of King Lear, then charts the growth of the notion of Shakespeare-as-literary-deity. This led, he argues, to the belief that the playwright must have been someone who possessed a superior education, was intimate with aristocrats and royals, had traveled extensively and owned a vast library—all of which exclude the man from Stratford. Early candidates ranged widely, but it was Delia Bacon who advanced the cause of Francis Bacon, a choice who attracted support from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Helen Keller and other notables. John Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified (1920) proposed the current champion—Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford—whose legions have swollen, says Shapiro, because of sympathetic print and electronic journalists, the Internet and the recent accommodations of mainstream publishers. What has also propelled the surge is the Oxfordians’ belief that the works must have arisen from the playwright’s personal, firsthand experience. Shapiro sharply challenges this belief and convincingly demonstrates that it would have baffled Elizabethans and Jacobeans—not to mention that it would have ignored the power of a writer’s imagination. The author bases his own conviction on the documentary evidence that he summarizes near the end.
A thorough, engaging work whose arguments would prove more persuasive were we not living in an era of such fierce anti-intellectualism and pervasive conspiracy theory.Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4162-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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