Convincing proposal that one of the most inept and eccentric European rulers in a turbulent age was the ultimate promoter of the arts and sciences in Western culture.
With good reason, British cultural historian Marshall (The Philosopher’s Stone, not reviewed, etc.) devotes considerable attention to the years that a teenaged Hapsburg prince spent at the court of his uncle, Phillip II of Spain. Future Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) became fully “Spaniolated” (as one English emissary reported to Elizabeth I) in his courtly and personal manners, but watching Uncle Phillip barbecue heretics and wield the dreaded Inquisition as a weapon against his political foes led Rudolf to reject rigid Catholic intolerance of other beliefs. The court he later founded at Prague’s Hradcany Castle (to escape the irritating bustle of Vienna) established that city as an island of tolerance in sectarian-riven Europe. Shy, dyspeptic and melancholy to the point of clinical depression, Rudolf had a regrettable tendency to put off important political decisions, even his own marriage, which were boring in comparison to his preoccupation with alchemy, astrology and the sciences. But he assembled a fascinating collection of both authentic and charlatan brainpower under his patronage. Prague became a beacon to the likes of mathematician Johannes Kepler, who paid his bills doing astrological charts for nobility, and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe; their collaboration produced the momentous Laws of Planetary Motion. Marshall suggests that his subject may have been the “greatest patron of the arts” who ever lived. Rudolf’s reward? A lonely death, and historians’ judgment that he was a weak, ineffectual ruler.
A revelatory biography, particularly for Americans whose history classes treat Eastern Europe as the far side of the world.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1551-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | WORLD | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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