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
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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