Next book

GRAVEN WITH DIAMONDS

THE MANY LIVES OF THOMAS WYATT: POET, LOVER, STATESMAN, AND SPY IN THE COURT OF HENRY VIII

A gracefully written, thoroughly researched story of an agile and articulate survivor.

The author of A Rage for Rock-Gardening: The Story of Reginald Farrer (2004) returns with a nuanced look at the poetry and life of Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542).

Along with just about everyone else in the court of Henry VIII, Wyatt, who brought the Petrarchan sonnet to England, had to master the intricacies of the survival dance in that era—or kneel before the chopping block. (Wyatt somehow survived—barely—his king’s bloody capriciousness.) Shulman charts the choreography of Wyatt’s career during the time of Henry and later. She notes that his reputation as a poet had fallen considerably, but she, among others, is effecting a restoration. She sketches the rise of the Tudors and then rehearses the biographies of the wives of Henry VIII, noting along the way the roles that Wyatt played—or didn’t play—on the marital merry-go-round. Throughout, the author closely examines Wyatt’s various love poems, noting that he wrote not for publication but for circulation among friends and associates. She acknowledges one severe problem: Wyatt’s poems have no dates, so inference is the historian’s closest companion. But Shulman, confronting her daunting task with aplomb and sensitivity, shows us how Wyatt’s lyrics, subtle and layered, can refer to a deer or a woman, a hunt or a courtship. She also examines the courtly love tradition, the influence and status of Chaucer, the psychology of the king and the tangled history of the English Reformation. Readers of Hilary Mantel’s two novels about Thomas Cromwell will enjoy seeing him in a different context (and—spoiler alert—will learn his fate). Shulman also reveals her own considerable lyrical chops: On Anne Boleyn: “With her wit, her dazzle, her ludic, punning Burgundian manners, she melted into his [Henry’s] dream of Albion.”

A gracefully written, thoroughly researched story of an agile and articulate survivor.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-58642-207-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Steerforth

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview