For both scholar and lay reader, a historical study that makes us wish for more like it on subjects too often only glanced...
Versatile nonfiction author Budiansky (Air Power, 2004, etc.) takes on the career of Elizabeth I’s wily Puritan ambassador, in an occasionally clotted but ultimately riveting study.
Walsingham was one of the new generation of university-educated laymen from the gentry (rather than nobility), men of the Renaissance Enlightenment whom Queen Elizabeth I sagely kept around her, the other two being William Cecil (Lord Burghley) and the Earl of Leicester. Promoted by Cecil as Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, where he nearly lost his life during the ghastly Bartholomew Massacre of 1572, Walsingham quickly ascended to the position of Principal Secretary, a job he largely created himself. A polyglot and master of discretion, Mr. Secretary, as he was known, had to “understand the state of the whole realm” as well as take the blame from his irascible queen when something went wrong. Walsingham, whose motto was “Hear all reports but trust not all,” built up a network of “paid scoundrels” to infiltrate Catholic circles, being faced continually with crisis after crisis involving the conniving Mary Queen of Scots and her sympathetic Catholic followers. Walsingham finally engineered a conspiratorial web around Mary that caused her to betray herself in correspondence, and the Babington plotters were caught. A hard-liner, Walsingham pushed for Mary’s execution, and, despite Elizabeth’s vacillation, the warrant was signed and Mary executed in 1587. Further, Walsingham warned of Spain’s recalcitrance and, overcoming Elizabeth’s “perfected art of tactical delay,” saw the triumph of the English fleet over the Spanish Armada. Budiansky gets bogged down in detail at the start, as he opens his story in Paris with the first attempted murder of the Huguenot leader Coligny just prior to Bartholomew Day, then stepping back to fill in the picture. The result is a satisfying and shrewd portrait of a key historical and very human figure.
For both scholar and lay reader, a historical study that makes us wish for more like it on subjects too often only glanced at.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03426-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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