A compelling trek through English history in the company of some remarkable women.
How the little-known queens of England’s early history contributed to the nation’s political stability—or didn’t.
In this vast, rigorous text, Hilton (Athenais: The Life of Louis XIV’s Mistress, the Real Queen of France, 2002) includes an impressive bibliography, and the reading experience requires frequent switchbacks and consultations of family trees (mercifully provided). The narrative encompasses the lives of queens from William the Conqueror’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, whose alliances were key to his success at Hastings in 1066, to Elizabeth of York, who had been designated as a bride for her uncle Richard III, until the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 heralded the triumph of Henry VII and the end of the medieval era. The author is fascinated by the things that set these women apart among their sex: their “sacred capital“; their legal rights (they could manage their own affairs, while most females other than widows had to submit to masculine authority); their uncommon education; their piety and the cult of maternity associating them with the Virgin Mary. Hilton examines the double standard that depicted assertive queens as unbecomingly masculine viragos. Strategically tracing tangled hereditary strains, the narrative moves from the rule of the Normans and the Angevins to the “apogee of English queenship” under the very literate Matilda of Scotland and later Matilda of Boulogne, who was adored by her husband, King Stephen. Foreign queens from the South included the exceptionally powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine, who overcame stifling 12th-century strictures to become a formidable politician, and a terrifying mother-in-law. During the turbulent period of the Plantagenet monarchs, the extraordinary Isabella of France first deposed her husband’s probable homosexual lover and then King Edward II himself in order to install her son on the throne. The book closes with the feud between the houses of Lancaster and York, painting a touching portrait of the love match between commoner Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV.
A compelling trek through English history in the company of some remarkable women.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-105-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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