With skill, humor, and sound scholarship, Coote drags into the foreground a man whom history has carelessly consigned to the...
A sturdy and occasionally stirring biography of the Restoration bureaucrat and celebrated diarist Pepys (1633–1703).
Coote (Royal Survivor, 2000) rightly acknowledges Pepys’s remarkable diary as the greatest single source of information available for much of the quotidian detail of Restoration life. Pepys himself was a kind of Zelig: as a teenager he was present at the beheading of Charles I, he graduated from Cambridge, excelled at music, and became the trusted servant and secretary for naval affairs for Charles II, a member of Parliament whose speeches displayed a mastery of detail and rhetoric, a fellow of the Royal Society, an eloquent witness of the Great Fire, and a devoted fan of Restoration drama whose comments on individual productions appear in countless histories of English theater. His diary also records his more prurient interests, for Pepys, although married, was a pretty randy fellow. Barmaids, servant girls, wives of subordinates, women who happened to be near him in church—all were targets for his roving eyes and exploring hands. (Indeed, it was not until his wife caught him with his hand up the skirt of a servant that his serial adultery began to slow.) The author paints a portrait of a committed bureaucrat, a Restoration workaholic whose fierce attention to detail and mastery of the memorandum enabled him to rise in civil service until he was made responsible for the outfitting of the Royal Navy. Later, when venomous anti-Catholicism began to poison public life, Pepys literally fought for his life as determined enemies of the Catholic kings Charles II and James II sought to approximate regicide by destroying the credibility of the king’s trusted advisers with spurious charges of popery. His eyesight failing, Pepys eventually cleared his name and enjoyed a rich retirement surrounded by his beloved books and friends.
With skill, humor, and sound scholarship, Coote drags into the foreground a man whom history has carelessly consigned to the background.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-23929-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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