The groaning shelves of books about English royalty hardly require another volume, but at least Waller's take is...
Glossy, deeply detailed, occasionally repetitious comparative examination of the six queens who have ruled England in their own right.
No law barred women from the medieval nation’s throne, writes British historian Waller (London 1945, 2005, etc.), “but in practice the idea of female sovereignty was anathema.” Although Henry I left the crown to his daughter Matilda, she was never actually anointed queen, and a male cousin snatched the throne in 1135. After that, most women with royal claims ceded or were forced to cede their rights to husbands or male relatives. Henry VIII’s daughters were the first two queens to actually rule. Catholic Mary I (1553–58), daughter of Henry’s banished Queen Katherine, succeeded her Protestant brother, Edward VI, in a coup d’état; her dubious legacy included an unpopular marriage to Philip II of Spain and the burning of heretics. Elizabeth I (1558–1603) restored Protestantism and enjoyed a magnificent reign, trumping male discomfort “by claiming to have ‘the body but of a weak and feeble woman’ but ‘the heart and stomach of a king.’ ” Mary II (1689–94), reluctant to assume power when Parliament excluded her Catholic father, James II, generally deferred to husband and joint sovereign William III. Her frugal younger sister Anne (1702–14) ascended after William’s death and proved the last of the Stuarts. The mighty Victoria (1837–1901), who assumed the throne at age 18, favored a domestic role and actually expressed hostility to women’s entry into professional life. Queen Elizabeth II (1952–) remains elusive, yet dauntless in will and absolutely loyal to her people.
The groaning shelves of books about English royalty hardly require another volume, but at least Waller's take is refreshingly feminist.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-33801-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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