A fascinating life within an endlessly fascinating era.
Biographer of the Mitford sisters, Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham, among others, Lovell offers here a thoroughgoing, readable account of an extraordinary matriarch of Elizabethan times.
Bess Hardwick (1527–1608) started out respectably enough, but would have gotten lost among the numerous progeny of her well-born but improvident family of gentlemen farmers had she not been married off brilliantly at age 15, only to be widowed two years later by her even younger husband. She made a greater match with Sir William Cavendish, treasurer of King Henry VIII, and together the two became opportunistic buyers of land, most notably the manor of Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The Cavendishes were masterly at navigating a place next to successive monarchs, from boy-king Edward, to brief, tragic Jane Grey, to the Catholic Queen Mary, and finally Elizabeth, with whom Bess shared an iron will and intelligence that warranted a lifetime of respect between the two women. With Cavendish’s death, the wily Bess married Sir William St. Loe, an early ally of Elizabeth (as well as a distant relation to the author, apparently); the match seems to be the passionate love of her life. With his mysterious and sudden death in 1564 (perhaps poisoned by his envious brother), Bess was again an eligible widow, with numerous children and stepchildren, attracting her most glorious husband yet, the Earl of Shrewsbury, “arguably the richest man in the country.” The role of the Shrewsburys was most famously as custodians of the troublesome Mary, Queen of Scots, and for the next 15 years she would be virtually imprisoned in one or the other of their estates. Ambitious Bess would try Elizabeth’s patience with the secret marriage of her daughter to Margaret Lennox’s younger son, producing the royal next-in-line Lady Arbella (see Sarah Gristwood’s Arbella, 2005). Lovell has synthesized admirably a staggering amount of information here (in lineage alone), and she presents it with verve.
A fascinating life within an endlessly fascinating era.Pub Date: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06221-X
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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