Properly accentuates this much-maligned queen’s achievements, but not always convincing when trying to explain away her...
Brisk, learned reassessment of Mary Tudor, whose short reign featured beheadings and burnings, but also political and social reforms for which she has never received proper credit.
A former university lecturer, Porter debuts with a difficult assignment: painting a gentler expression on the grim visage traditionally given to “Bloody Mary.” The author pinpoints several factors in what she sees as a historical injustice. The first is Acts and Monuments, John Foxe’s graphic, wildly popular account of Protestant martyrs’ sufferings during Mary’s attempts to restore England to Roman Catholicism. Centuries of male Protestant historians have tended to follow the general line of Foxe’s book, in print ever since it was first published in 1563. It didn’t help Mary’s reputation that her turbulent years as queen (1553–58) were immediately followed by half-sister Elizabeth’s much longer and admittedly more glorious reign. Porter champions her subject with sturdy determination and fixed focus. She revisits Henry VIII’s long marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother, and the failure to produce a male heir that prompted Katherine’s repudiation and Henry’s break with Rome. She deals with the short reign of Mary’s half-brother Edward VI and examines the mercurial relationship between Mary and Elizabeth. She explores the political marriage between Mary and Philip II of Spain, who did his marital duties but eagerly escaped to the continent whenever he could to avoid his older and not very alluring wife. Porter argues that the queen did not want to restore medieval Catholicism, even though the burnings at the stake of Thomas Cranmer and nearly 300 others suggest the contrary. The author credits Mary for encouraging the arts, insisting on better education for the clergy, initiating some fiscal reforms and being true to the religion whose verities she never questioned.
Properly accentuates this much-maligned queen’s achievements, but not always convincing when trying to explain away her failures.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36837-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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