A graphic account of the man who, among other swashbuckling exploits, was the first to sail around the world and was largely responsible for saving England from invasion by the Spanish Armada. Born in Devon in 1542 of humble stock, Sir Francis Drake has long been one of England's archetypal heroes. Generations of British schoolchildren have heard of his bravery, his sense of humor, and his magnanimity toward captives, how he ``singed the King of Spain's beard'' by his daring raid on C†diz in 1587, and how, when informed that the Armada had been sighted off the coast of Plymouth, he continued his game of bowles with superb sangfroid. Cummins, a retired professor of Spanish (Univ. of Aberdeen, Scotland), tells us of the perils of the circumnavigation in the Golden Hind, the logistics of Spain's invasion plans, and Drake's many voyages and frequent plundering of Spanish gold. We also read of his less-known devout Protestantism and his claiming of California for England as Nova Albion in 1579. Cummins gives careful and detailed treatment to the controversial case of Thomas Doughty, who was tried and executed by Drake for insubordination during the voyage round the world. Our author brings an extensive knowledge of the English and Spanish literature to his narrative, and he often quotes original documents and eyewitness accounts. He concludes with a fascinating examination of the Drake legend in subsequent centuries, not least the invocation of his spirit in 1941, when Britain was again faced with mortal peril. Although Cummins does not omit Drake's faults, he is no revisionist: He repeats the traditional view, in which sacrilege, greed, slave trading, and piracy are manifestations of a heroic free spirit. A scholarly but basically laudatory picture, nicely timed for the fourth centenary of Drake's death next year.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-15811-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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