Coote (W. B. Yeats: A Life, not reviewed), brings to life the Restoration and the sly, lascivious king who personified it. Beginning in 1628 as Charles I learns that his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, has been murdered, Coote ignites interest early and illuminates the murky labyrinth of 17th century English politics. Writing with felicity and panache, he explains the fall and execution of Charles I; the rise and fall of the Cromwells; the initial failures of the beheaded king’s son, young exile Charles Stuart, to martial forces from continental allies to help him regain the throne; and his eventual return in 1660 to assume the crown. Coote displays his considerable narrative gifts to greatest advantage in his account of young fugitive Charles plotting to leave England while Cromwell’s spies are combing the countryside for him. And the pages devoted to London’s Great Fire of 1666 are swift and lyrical: “Huge fireballs rolled with awful destruction, and, drawing the air to themselves, created vacuums of such a scale that spires and ancient walls imploded, destroyed by an invisible power few if any understood.” But Coote is equally adept at clarifying the complex geopolitical questions of a time when internecine political alliances raged like flash fires, and at examining the ferocious anti-Catholic prejudices that were as destructive to London’s social fabric as the Great Fire was to its real estate. He savors the irony of the ailing Charles’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism, especially in the context of spicy details about the king’s sex life (seven mistresses produced 12 bastards) and about other excesses at court: An 18-inch dwarf kept by Charles’s mother was once “brought to the dinner table hidden in a pie.— Working the vein of English royal history previously prospected by popular historians Carolly Erickson, Antonia Fraser, and Alison Weir, Coote strikes gold. (16 pages photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22687-X
Page Count: 396
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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