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
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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