Recent elections in Britain and the United States have produced surprisingly dysfunctional governments. De Lisle’s fine,...
Biography of an English king whose “life and reign add up to far more than the sum of his mistakes.”
Charles I (1600-1649) has always received bad press as the villain of “the triumph of virtuous, warty-faced politicians and soldiers over a king who is weak, stupid and backward looking…a mere speed bump on the high road to liberal democracy.” Reading this description on the first page, one may suspect that the author disagrees. Sure enough, veteran British historian de Lisle (Tudor: Passion. Manipulation. Murder. The Story of England’s Most Notorious Royal Family, 2013) delivers a more generous portrait. Charles was the son of James I and mostly a chip off the old block: a High Church Anglican who believed in the divine right of kings and clerical authority, which guaranteed trouble with the austere, Protestant Calvinists who were gaining power. Charles ruled without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, but lack of money and war with Scotland forced his hand. Fiercely anti-Royalist, the legislature passed a torrent of laws limiting his authority and expanding its own while persecuting his advisers. Despite plenty of Royalist support, Charles lacked his opponents’ political acumen and ruthlessness, even after raising his standard in 1642. In 1647, after a bloody civil war, he found himself a prisoner of Parliament, the members of which wanted a negotiated settlement that might have happened if extremists under Oliver Cromwell hadn’t expelled that majority in 1649, leaving those willing to condemn the king. De Lisle’s parliamentarians are an irascible group, resembling not so much freedom fighters as the tea party; on the other hand, the author’s Charles often seems the voice of reason.
Recent elections in Britain and the United States have produced surprisingly dysfunctional governments. De Lisle’s fine, revisionist view of Charles may arouse nostalgia for a time when national leaders, elected or not, looked out for the nonzealous majority.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-560-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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