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
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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