by Nicola Shulman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2013
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 Throughout, the author closely examines Wyatt’s various love poems, noting that he wrote not for publication but for circulation among friends and associates.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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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