by Robert Hutchinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 30, 2012
Hutchinson provides insight into Henry’s spoiled life and his self-orbiting attitude, but surely there was more to the young...
Biography of the younger life of the infamous Tudor king.
As the second son, Henry did not have a grand household like his brother, but his father, Henry VII, showered honors on him at an early age. Hutchinson (House of Treason: The Rise & Fall of a Tudor Dynasty, 2010, etc.) mentions little about either Henry’s relationship to his older brother or his brother’s death, which led to Henry becoming heir to the throne. Most of the author’s information comes from household accounts, which expose the vast amounts spent by both Henry and his father on pomp, play and show. The Tudors spent lavishly on themselves with money taken from their subjects by state blackmail. Henry’s taxes and penalties squeezed his nobles “until their very pips squeaked.” The king did not bother much with statehood, save the occasional beheading of an errant Yorkist or landowner whose estate he coveted. He was known to have state papers read to him at Mass, letting secretaries handle matters, and he was perfectly happy to leave everything to his Lord Chancellor, Wolsey, who took charge as Henry spent his time hunting, jousting and gambling. This is primarily the story of Henry VIII and his remarkable spending habits. His attempt at military genius was a complete failure, the only success being his ostentation at the peace treaty signing on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Truly, Henry just didn’t seem to care about anything except hawking, jousting, dancing and gaming, although other sources indicate broader interests and vast intelligence.
Hutchinson provides insight into Henry’s spoiled life and his self-orbiting attitude, but surely there was more to the young man than this.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01261-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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