An admirable, mildly revisionist update on a widely misunderstood king.
The 2012 discovery of Richard III’s remains produced a flurry of accounts of the famous Shakespearean villain whose short reign ended in the battle that launched the Tudor dynasty. In this latest, British historian Jones (After Hitler: The Last Days of the Second World War in Europe, 2015, etc.) rocks no boats and agrees with most modern scholars that Richard (1452-1485) was not such a bad fellow.
Richard III lived during the War of the Roses, a highly unstable, violent period in British history. His father died in battle in 1460 after almost achieving the crown, which went to Richard’s brother, Edward IV, who reigned from 1461 to 1483. Richard served him more or less loyally until his death, when he revived an old accusation that Edward was illegitimate, making Richard himself the legitimate heir. Enjoying considerable support among the nobility and parliament, he was crowned three months later. Despite the absence of proof, most scholars believe Richard murdered Edward’s sons (“the princes in the Tower”), but killing rival claimants, even as children, was not unknown in that era. Another rival, Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), had only a distant claim; his bumbling invasion and shocking victory against superior forces continue to bewitch historians. Jones tries his hand, and the result depends heavily on speculation, hints from contemporary documents, and parallels with other medieval battles. This is unavoidable due to the dearth of evidence. The location of the battlefield itself remains controversial; new findings reveal that Richard was not severely hunchbacked but do not answer major questions. “It is a more untidy and unsettling reality than the caricature with which we are familiar,” writes the author.
An admirable, mildly revisionist update on a widely misunderstood king.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-859-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Wyatt-Brown (History/Univ. of Florida; Southern Honor, not reviewed, etc.) buries a good idea under an avalanche of scholarly detail. Too much of this study is concerned with the first Percys in America, an interesting but not exceptional bunch of slaveholding frontiersmen led by one ``Don Carlos'' Percy, an apparent bigamist who also seems to have shared the Percy predisposition to melancholia. His other legacies to future Percys were a fondness for Stoicism, Catholicism, conservatism, and an aristocratic sense of honor. Thus Wyatt-Brown's thesis (i.e., ax) to demonstrate (i.e., grind): that generations of Percys are linked by the ethics of chivalry, the tendency to chronic depression, and the predilection for mythmaking. Among the mythmakers were two 19th- century sisters (Wyatt-Brown calls them ``two Southern Brontâs'') who churned out mediocre verse and commonplace gothic fiction. A later relative, Sarah Dorsey, achieved minor fame as a postCivil War romance novelist and major notoriety as the close friend of the married Jefferson Davis, with whom she bemoaned the decline of the South during Reconstruction. Real distinction came in the 20th century with LeRoy Percy, a US senator from Mississippi, who was an ardent foe of the Ku Klux Klan. His son, the poet William Alexander Percy, shared the same sense of noblesse oblige. ``A bachelor with severe inhibitions'' (i.e., a closeted homosexual), Will eventually published Lanterns on the Levee, a classic of the modern South. Walker Percy's grandfather (the senator's brother) and father both committed suicide, but the novelist worked through his existential melancholy, argues Wyatt-Brown, by creating many fine works of fiction. No literary critic, Wyatt-Brown forgets why most readers would pick up this book in the first place. He barely mentions Walker Percy until well over 200 pages into the book, by which time most nonhistorians are likely to have set it aside.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-505626-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Wingo rather frothily admits that, like ``all good sea stories,'' her reminiscence of her stint in the WAVES has been ``embellished.'' Now a retired teacher and a Santa Monica community activist, Wingo remembers feeling like Joan of Arc at her enlistment in the WAVES (Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1944 at the age of 20. An Irish Catholic raised in Detroit, she attends boot camp at Hunter College in the Bronx, where the ``barracks'' are a five-story apartment building. Recruits are called Ripples (``Little Waves, silly''), and Wingo says that ``boot camp is like a harder Girl Scout camp'' where you learn that a ``misbegotten granny knot could screw up the whole war.'' Her bunkmates (the characters are composites) include Coralee Tolliver, a chunky ``hillbilly'' whom she despises (though Wingo later serves as her maid of honor), and Barbara Lee Corman, who calls everyone ``honeychile'' and juggles five ``fian-says.'' The trio gets assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago where they train on guns. Following a Navy Day parade in which Wingo, in full dress, rides astraddle a torpedo, she and her buddies are shipped out to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to train the men in the Armed Guard for at-sea duty while they, as women, will remain ashore. Wingo falls for a tattooed sailor named Blackie (he calls her ``Toots'') until he admits he visits prostitutes because it ``saves the nice girls for when we want to marry them.'' She describes a chaotic V-J Day celebration and a whirlwind tour of New York City; and she offers an entire chapter about getting drunk and sick aboard a Russian ship anchored in San Francisco Bay. Jocular and occasionally appealing, this suffers from an almost complete lack of hard information or historical perspective on the very real contributions of the WAVES.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1994
ISBN: 1-55750-924-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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