Guy exposes Becket’s history so well that readers may question how much of a saint he really was.
In this lively new biography of Thomas Becket, Guy (A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg, 2009, etc.) illustrates his vast knowledge of medieval England.
The author explains Becket’s non-royal, but hardly peasant, heritage and describes a stammering youth in which he had little interest in study. His Norman parents saw to it that he was well educated, however, including sending him to France for his studies. There he met his lifelong friend, John of Salisbury, who would provide a firsthand account of Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral. France was also a flight to safety from tensions at home. Becket was well-known as rakish, lazy and vain, and he never really applied himself to his studies. When Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, took him into his household, he realized his failings and set to ameliorate his poor education with an autodidactic fervor. Becket watched and learned as Theobald politicized the relationship between the king and archbishop, not realizing that he, too, would one day face exile as he refused to be “bullied by a tyrant.” In his nine years of service to the archbishop, Becket gained considerable power and riches, but many still regarded him as a newcomer aspiring to be an insider. However, he felt he was an equal, especially after he was appointed as the king’s chancellor. The author’s exhaustive research shows that Becket clung to the trappings of wealth he had accumulated well after being appointed as archbishop.
Guy exposes Becket’s history so well that readers may question how much of a saint he really was.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6907-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
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