A slim volume packing plenty of information, and a useful reminder of how a single event—executed in seconds—can have...
How the murder with a handgun of a prince in the 16th century became the shot heard around the world.
Like the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1918 and John F. Kennedy in 1963, that of Prince William the Silent in 1584 created a sensation in its day. In her fast-paced account of the murder of the father of an independent Netherlands, historian Jardine (Renaissance Studies/Queen Mary Univ., London; The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 2004, etc.) charts the religious/political struggle during the 16th century that pitted the Catholic Hapsburgs against Europe’s Protestants. Groomed early in life by the Hapsburgs to be a faithful servant, William later changed his allegiance in response to the Spanish persecution of Dutch Protestants. As his conflict with his Dutch subjects intensified, Spain’s King Philip II saw the uncooperative William as a traitor and placed a price on his head. Spurred by Philip’s appeals, a French Catholic finally silenced the prince with bullets discharged from the latest in deadly technology: a wheel-lock pistol. Jardine successfully illustrates how William’s murder unleashed paranoia in England as the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and her advisers feared for her safety. Her occasional attempts to tie the heated religious disputes of the 16th century with present day troubles can sometimes distract from the narrative, but overall, she succeeds in recreating a snapshot of a long-forgotten event.
A slim volume packing plenty of information, and a useful reminder of how a single event—executed in seconds—can have significant historical implications.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-083835-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
