An intelligent author gracefully feeds readers a great deal of complicated dynastic information in a most palatable fashion.
Scottish writer and producer Graham (BBC’s Elizabeth) delivers a robust, evenhanded life of Elizabeth I’s Catholic cousin and eventual betrayer.
The author clearly has little sympathy for pampered Mary Stuart (1542–87), who lacked her older cousin’s masculine education, not to mention Elizabeth’s shrewd political instincts, and relied instead on her charming good looks to manipulate men. (Graham calls Mary “one of the great weepers of history.”) Early on, Mary was treated as a pawn by the Guises, her mother’s aristocratic French family, who controlled the Scottish throne she inherited from her father, James V, when she was six days old. The Guises arranged Mary’s upbringing at the French court of Henri II and her betrothal at age four to his son and heir. Raised under the wily blandishments of Henri’s beautiful mistress, Diane de Poitiers, Mary was steeped in Catholicism and courtly romances. Her 1558 marriage to the unstable, sickly Dauphin (who became king a year later) ended with his untimely death in 1560. She was returned to Scotland at age 18 mostly because no one knew what to do with her, an unfortunate theme throughout her life. Mary provoked her own expulsion from her native country and throne with her two subsequent marriages. She was implicated in the assassination of Lord Darnley, father of her only child, the future James VI, and later compromised by the ambitious machinations of the adulterous Lord Bothwell. Facing imprisonment in Scotland, the “whore queen” threw herself on the mercy of her reluctant cousin. During the next 20 years, her shelter in England gradually grew into a stricter imprisonment as the spy network of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s closest advisor, intercepted Mary’s treasonous letters seeking help among Catholic factions and even from England’s archenemy, Philip II of Spain. Despite his occasional exasperation with his subject, Graham is a knowledgeable guide to the tricky terrains of Scottish and British history in the 16th century.
An intelligent author gracefully feeds readers a great deal of complicated dynastic information in a most palatable fashion.Pub Date: July 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-049-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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