A slow-smoldering, steadily argued work of historical significance.
The Grey sisters receive a compelling treatment from De Lisle (After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England, 2006).
In this sympathetic biography of the three grand-nieces of Henry VIII who had a real shot at reigning in England, the author stresses the theme that women were deeply scorned and feared as rulers. However, during the generation after Henry died, de Lisle notes, “the entire political system, the stability of England” would be borne out by the actions of females, “beings to be used and manipulated.” In 1544, Henry had established his line of succession, which moved from his young son Edward down to his two “illegitimate” daughters Mary and Elizabeth, to the descendants of his youngest sister, Frances Brandon (the Grey branch). Lady Jane Grey, the eldest sister and most promising in terms of intellectual accomplishment and resolve, was apparently an even better pupil than her cousin Elizabeth. But she was prey to all manner of schemes by relatives and guardians to marry her off, and de Lisle suggests that her true hope was to marry King Edward. However, because Edward had named the Grey branch as his rightful successors, Jane was finagled into marrying Lord Guildford Dudley to produce a quick son and heir. With Edward’s death, Lady Jane ruled for a fortnight, before the people of England rose up to demand that Mary Tudor be rightfully installed. Jane’s two sisters, warily watched and imprisoned under Elizabeth, would escape the chopping block but endure bleak fates of their own. De Lisle is to be commended for skillfully drawing out the stories of these undervalued personages, especially the one who stood in line to inherit the throne before the Grey sisters—their poor overlooked mother, Frances.
A slow-smoldering, steadily argued work of historical significance.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-49135-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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