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 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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