A romantic take on the powerful medieval queen.
A central figure in the 12th-century wars between France and England, Eleanor, at 15, became Duchess of Aquitaine, a wealthy and independent French province coveted by both countries. While still a teenager, she married Louis VII, a religious zealot who kept her closely confined, and after years of conflict, she persuaded the Pope to annul her marriage. Within a year she married again, this time to the brutal English Henry II. Despite bearing him eight children, the two came to hate each other. As her children grew, she persuaded them to revolt against their father, who in turn imprisoned her for 17 years, though in the end she had the last laugh, serving as regent after his death while her son, Richard the Lionhearted, crusaded in the Holy Land. Historians are silent on Eleanor’s sex life, but Kaufman (Shield of Three Lions, 1983) well understands that romance requires romance and so she invents the great Baron Rancon of Aquitaine and recounts a secret, dangerous, and passionate affair, Eleanor’s only consistent joy during years of unhappiness. Kaufman is unarguably an expert on the period, but her tale is told at the level of, say, a Hollywood epic, whose historical characters behave like modern Americans except for the funny clothes. Heroine Eleanor is a fiery queen, dazzlingly beautiful yet as skilled in statecraft and horsemanship as any man. She’s also a feminist, outraged at the treatment of women in medieval Europe. Because Kaufman doesn’t re-create a world through the narrative, she is forced to stop the action periodically and have a character to deliver a lecture on, say, the structure of feudalism (“ . .. any child knows the system of homage and overlords. My father used to call it a pyramid with the king at the top . . . ”).
Historical fiction for the Barbara Cartland set.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60906-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
12
GET IT
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
