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
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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