An elucidating though occasionally long-winded biography.
Richly contextual treatment of a pivotal Medieval English monarch who consolidated the British Isles, but at violent cost and future retribution.
In his age of chivalry and crusade, Edward I (1239-1307) had all the qualities of a successful, memorable leader—eloquence, decisiveness, piety, courage in battle, luck in marriage and health, and a keenness for building projects—but was he a good king? English historian Morris (The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England, 2013, etc.) gives Edward all the benefit of the doubt as the author sifts chronologically through the king’s significant legacy. The first Edward since the Norman Conquest, named by his father after his patron saint, Edward the Confessor, young Edward was pulled into his father’s political wrangling with insurgencies in Wales, Scotland and Gascony (Aquitaine) and inculcated with the importance of securing the rights of the crown against the resentments of the powerful earls. In 1258, he and his father were essentially shackled by the Provisions of Oxford, through which the earls had restrained the oppressive government. One earl, Simon of Montfort, nearly toppled the kingdom before Edward and his fellow royalists caught up with Simon at the slaughter of Evesham in 1265. Acceding to the crown in his mid-30s, Edward reaped the poisonous policy of disinheriting the vanquished. The dispossessed Welsh leader Llywelyn ap Gruffudd would prove the bane of Edward’s own early reign, while the policy of repression in Ireland and Scotland, as well as forced revenue for holy crusading and war with France, would continue to haunt him, causing enormous dislocation and lawlessness. Moreover, Edward has the dubious distinction of being the first European leader to expel the Jews from his kingdom, in 1290. In the end, Morris sees Edward’s legacy as one of “profound and lasting division.”
An elucidating though occasionally long-winded biography.Pub Date: March 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-684-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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