Ricardians rejoice!
Exciting, engagingly narrated tale of the “search to discover the real Richard III,” co-authored by screenwriter Langley and historian Jones (Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin, 2011, etc.).
What would drive Langley to spearhead a quest to dig up a car park in Leicester, searching for the remains of Richard III? The author credits her initial inspiration to Paul Murray Kendall’s biography Richard III, which refutes the Shakespearean image of the king. However, it was after reading her co-author’s Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle (2002) that she found the story she needed to tell. During her research, she was drawn to a car park across from the supposed site of Richard’s grave. A strange sensation, pounding heart, dry mouth and a cold chill convinced her that she was at the correct site. On her second visit, she discovered a newly painted “R” (for a reserved parking spot) in the same spot where she knew the king’s grave would be found. The book is woven cleverly with the story of the author’s drive for funding, archaeology details and permission requests, alternating with Jones’ strong biography of Richard. This much-maligned king reigned only two years, but there was no sign of an evil character in the courageous warrior who was devoted to his father and brother. While no one can defend the death of the two princes in the tower, the authors note that Richard’s nephew and grandnephew, his legitimate heirs, each disappeared during the two subsequent reigns. “[W]e put a stop to the stigmatizing and vilification and allow for complexity,” write the authors. Compelling throughout, this unlikely story of a three-week dig in an obscure car park is simultaneously informative and enchanting. Langley and Jones include extensive family trees and a helpful timeline.
Ricardians rejoice!Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04410-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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