An unconvincing, if energetic, plea for giving robber barons the benefit of realpolitik.
One historian’s nomination of England’s John of Gaunt (1340–99), Duke of Lancaster and father of King Henry IV, as both chivalry’s last great practitioner and direct progenitor of the likes of Donald Trump.
Cantor (Emeritus, History and Sociology/NYU; Antiquity, 2003, etc.) amply documents the Duke’s qualifications: in rough priority order, connected powerbroker, warrior, proto-capitalist, and heterosexual (unlike nephew King Richard II). Yet it seems to take an inordinate amount of backtracking and reemphasis to wedge Gaunt satisfactorily into the selected symbolic role. This is not biography, but rather a picky academic argument as to why Gaunt’s life can be said to bring the medieval period to its close. Annual rents alone, controlled by Gaunt’s immediate Plantagenet family, apart from sundry bribes, tributes, and ransoms extracted under force of arms, would have made him, Cantor estimates, a billionaire (in today’s money) five times over. He patronized John Wyclif in cultivating the seeds of Reformation a century before its time, then dumped him on the brink; he likewise sponsored Geoffrey Chaucer, a relative by marriage, to the point where his output also began to sound a little radical to peers of Gaunt’s mindset, then backed off. He also loyally abstained from a throne grab when it might well have been his. But when Cantor runs out of undocumented assertions that Gaunt was unusually considerate—that is, “chivalrous”—toward all his mistresses but “never used a condom” (animal-based products were in fact available) it sounds more than a little like historical press agentry. Cantor’s interesting defense of the African slave trade as hypothetically posed by its instigator, Prince Henry (the Navigator) of Portugal, who was Gaunt’s grandson by his second marriage, also has stretch marks.
An unconvincing, if energetic, plea for giving robber barons the benefit of realpolitik.Pub Date: June 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2688-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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 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
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