A delightful story of intrigue and manipulation that shows how Henry really couldn’t control his kingdom.
Lipscomb (A Journey Through Tudor England: Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London to Stratford-upon-Avon and Thornbury Castle, 2015, etc.) shows Henry VIII’s attempt to continue control over both church and state.
His last will, signed a month before his death, set forth the steps of succession beginning with his son, Edward. After arranging for possible children of his current and any future wives, he pronounced first Mary, then Elizabeth to be the next successors. In naming his son, he also stipulated that Edward’s heirs, or named successors, were primary. In another scenario, instead of naming the heirs of his sister, Margaret, he skipped to the heirs of the daughter of his sister, Mary: Frances Grey—i.e. Lady Jane Grey. In the 1540s, after war with the Scots, Henry arranged with Marie de Guise, James V’s widow, to wed her infant daughter Mary to his son Edward. However, de Guise had bigger plans for her daughter in France and renounced the match. Henry never forgave a slight, so Mary Queen of Scots was left out of the succession plans. Another of Henry’s stipulations was that Masses should be said for his soul. This was particularly artful, as he had dissolved monasteries whose members prayed for souls. Hedging his bets, Henry still left land and revenues for Masses and prayers to ensure his place in heaven. He designated more than a dozen executors and regents in hopes the transfer of power would be smooth. The author, who shows her deep knowledge of the Tudor period throughout the book, rejects the many charges that Henry’s will might have been changed or altered or that undue influence was used. It was treason to even suggest that the king might die. Afterward, the story was completely different, with Edward Seymour and Chief Secretary William Paget seizing control of the Regency and the kingdom.
A delightful story of intrigue and manipulation that shows how Henry really couldn’t control his kingdom.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68-177254-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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 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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