A fine blending of the personal and the political.
A polished biography that illuminates the life and reign of Anne Stuart (1665-1714), queen of England.
Independent historian Cromwell (Florence Nightingale, Feminist, 2013, etc.) makes a convincing case for Queen Anne’s shrewdness at navigating the political extremes of her time, calling her the “least known and most underrated” of England’s female monarchs. Her father, King James II, was a Catholic who tried to pack Parliament with like-minded thinkers, but Anne resisted conversion attempts and remained a Protestant. In a highly polarized atmosphere, she formed a government, Cromwell notes, made up of moderate Whigs and Tories. After the reign of the Dutch-born William of Orange (who’d married Anne’s sister, Mary), Anne, who married the Danish Prince George, “felt she must restore Englishness to the crown.” The Duke of Marlborough was one of her key advisers during a war against France, and his wife, Sarah Churchill, was her particular friend. Cromwell pinpoints the three main issues of Anne’s reign from 1702 to her death in 1714: war and domestic political strife; physical struggles, including painful gout and numerous miscarriages; and a troubled relationship with Sarah, whom Mary thought of as “Anne’s evil genius.” While estranged from Anne, Sarah spread rumors about Anne’s supposed dalliances with women—and about the attention that the queen paid to Anne’s favorite servant, Abigail Masham. Cromwell refutes this, citing Anne’s letters to Sarah as proof of “passionate platonic love between women,” but she fully explores the continuing controversy over Abigail’s place at court. The book is thus well timed to capitalize on the recent success of the award-winning 2018 film The Favourite, which portrays Anne in a different way. The author’s scene-setting comments about the weather don’t always ring true (“a frivolous little breeze blew over London”), but her details regarding royal food, clothing, and gardens are vivid and sumptuous. A good number of quotes are taken from primary sources and supply the flavor of period speech. The intricacies of Whig and Tory machinations threaten to become tedious, but Cromwell wisely keeps the focus on the “extremely popular” monarch.
A fine blending of the personal and the political.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4766-7681-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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