A wealth of correspondence and a strong knowledge of the period combine in a capable book showing life at these strange...
An introduction to one of the Tudor family’s least-known women.
Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, was married to James IV of Scotland and bore his son, James V. Her second husband, Archibald Douglas, fathered her daughter, also named Margaret. She is the subject of Ring’s dramatic history of 16th-century England, a tempestuous period that has been the subject of many books—for good reason. Henry VII’s claims to the throne were based on distant family connections, and they fought back many usurpers. That fragile hold on the throne would continue throughout the family’s history; save the short reign of Edward VI. For decades, the Tudors fought to control the country’s religion, alternating from Catholic to Protestant to Elizabeth’s acceptance of the “private devotions” of Catholics. Even Elizabeth changed after the Catholic “Northern Rebellion” and the pope’s bull excommunicating her. As the Tudors worried about succession, young Margaret Douglas should always have been a factor—and she was, until a fight with her uncle, King Henry VIII, at the end of his life saw her removed from the succession. Margaret was also the half sister of the Scottish king, James V, and married to Matthew Stewart, the Scottish Earl of Lennox. Margaret was born into this political intrigue, and her life is a perfect example of Tudor machinations. Though she bore eight children in one of the happiest marriages in the Tudor dynasty, only two sons survived. One of them, Henry Darnley, was the object of their ambition, and his son would one day become James VI. Ring ably shows Margaret’s adaptation to religious mores and to the caprices of kings and queens, though she is less successful in that perpetual stumbling block of books about English history: connecting names, titles, and relationships.
A wealth of correspondence and a strong knowledge of the period combine in a capable book showing life at these strange medieval courts.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-605-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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