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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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