Anyone who loves English royal history will enjoy this new take on a personality surprisingly little mentioned in the...
Just when you thought there was nothing new to learn about Elizabethan England, Tallis (Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey, 2016) tells the compelling story of Lettice Knollys (1543-1634), who was close to the queen for years but eventually became her rival.
Lettice’s mother, Katherine, was most likely the illegitimate daughter of Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII and so half sister to Elizabeth, then Lettice’s aunt. Katherine and Elizabeth were raised together and were always very close. As queen, Elizabeth held Katherine and Lettice close to her at court. Both were favorites to the queen, but Lettice was not as wise as her mother and eventually married the queen’s suitor, Robert Dudley. That was after her first marriage to Walter Devereux, a marriage that was happy and produced a number of children. Dudley was the only one who really came close to talking Elizabeth into marriage, but it was never to be. After 20 years of waiting, he fell in love with Lettice, now widowed, and they married secretly. The author gives us a number of reasons why he would dare incur the queen’s wrath. Lettice offered marriage, heirs, and a stable domestic life, and they plunged ahead. It was a pleasant marriage, but Lettice seemed to throw her status up to the queen, infuriating her more. Dudley was eventually forgiven, but Lettice never was. For years, she sought forgiveness, hoping that her son might use his influence to bring it about. The fascinating connections between the great families of the period show what a small world it was; everyone was a cousin or spouse of someone connected to the queen. In her research, Tallis consulted many household records, correspondence, and a scandalous publication called Leicester’s Commonwealth, printed by Dudley’s enemies after his death. On the whole, the author provides an informative, well-crafted narrative and easily avoids the confusion of the nobility’s many titles.
Anyone who loves English royal history will enjoy this new take on a personality surprisingly little mentioned in the history books.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-657-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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