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