One of the best biographies of Elizabeth ever.
The Whitbread Award–winning author delivers an outstanding biography of Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603).
This page-turning book is history, biography, scholarship personified, and a crystal-clear look at Elizabeth in the war years that erases the myths and presents the real woman. Historian Guy (Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame, 2014, etc.), who is exceedingly well-versed in Tudor studies, deconstructs original sources, chooses which of many are more likely to be true, and shows Elizabeth as a vain, paranoid queen who endorsed torture and fought for her rights and privileges. Well-read, intelligent, fluent in French and Italian, Elizabeth believed she was beloved, but all her subjects could see were unproductive harvests and widespread poverty and disease. Among other primary sources, William Camden’s Annales, completed in Latin in 1617, is Guy’s best target. The author takes apart Camden’s statements as deeply biased and the English translation as pure bowdlerization. In 1584, the assassination of Prince William of Orange began the wars with Spain that would last the rest of Elizabeth’s life. The defeat of the first Spanish Armada in 1588 was only a short reprieve from the constant depletion of her treasury, as she also supported Henry IV of France against Spain and the Catholic League. Manipulated—and at the same time, likely saved—by Chief Minister Burghley and her spymaster, Francis Walsingham, she struggled to assert herself. It was Burghley’s contrivance of Mary, Queen of Scots’ death that brought Elizabeth to what the author calls her “Armada of the soul.” Her responsibility for the execution of an anointed queen haunted her for the rest of her life. During her 45-year reign, she learned how to get around those who disagreed with her, but she never succeeded in controlling some of her favorites. Near the end, Guy’s comparisons to Richard II, the usurped king, the usurper Bolingbroke, and Shakespeare’s play take your breath away.
One of the best biographies of Elizabeth ever.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-78602-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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