A human drama truly Shakespearean.
A British historian offers an intriguing, scholarly look at the short, sad life of Arbella Stuart, cousin to Queen Elizabeth I and too close in the line of succession to enjoy a life of her own.
Intrigue marked Arbella’s life, and, if you can follow the complicated Tudor-Stuart genealogy lesson, Gristwood’s account makes for suspenseful historical reading. The orphaned Arbella, related to Henry VII on her father’s side, was, at age six, put in the care of her ambitious maternal grandmother, fourth-time married Bess of Hardwick, who raised the child with an eye to her marrying grandly and/or succeeding to the throne. In fact, Arbella was second in line, after James of Scotland, and thus practically peerless, as well as jealously dreaded by both Queen Elizabeth (who had already had to get rid of Arbella’s aunt, the treacherous Mary Queen of Scots) and, later, by James I. Elizabeth didn’t know what to do with Arbella, inviting her once to court when she was 11 and using her as a marriage pawn when the queen needed to woo an ally, yet consigning her to Bess’s autocratic watch at Hardwick Hall for years of reclusive, hopeless study. Finally, by her late 20s, Arbella acted, secretly initiating her own nuptial match with another glorious lineage, the Seymour sons—first the elder, unsuccessfully, then the younger, William, whom she eventually managed to wed in 1610 before both were thrown into the Tower. From her letters and rather guileless, erratic behavior, Arbella seems truly to have been pleading for the right to personal liberty and the right to love (“When all is done I must shape my own coat according to my cloth”) rather than acting out of political machinations. Her tragedy touches in some way all of the schemers close to Elizabeth, such as Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex, chief minister Lord Burghley, and Sir Walter Raleigh, and they come alive here.
A human drama truly Shakespearean.Pub Date: May 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-34133-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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