An entertaining, insightful biography featuring a colorful cast of characters, led by the formidable Henry VII, who passed...
Henry VII, who reigned from 1485 to 1509, is little known compared to his son, Henry VIII, and granddaughter, Elizabeth I, but Verso Books editorial director Penn does an eminently satisfying job of remedying this.
Popular historians note that Henry VII’s death left England at peace and with a full treasury, but the author emphasizes that contemporaries breathed a sigh of relief at the exit of a paranoid, Machiavellian ruler who inspired no love. A usurper with only a distant claim to the throne, Henry Tudor returned from exile at age 28 to defeat Richard III on Bosworth Field. Although this ended the interminable, destructive War of the Roses, no one realized this at the time. Powerful nobles plotted his overthrow, and many supporters were lukewarm, so he spent his reign battling rebellions, obsessively seeking conspiracies (many genuine) and enhancing his power through surveillance, diplomacy and manipulation of trade. He also filled his coffers with fines, bonds for good behavior and property seizures, the result of a mixture of suspicion, pure greed and treason, real or fancied. Except for a single disastrous invasion of France, he avoided war and began a 300-year policy in which British rulers preferred sending money rather than armies to support European allies. This is straightforward politics-and-great-men history, and readers will refer frequently to the book’s genealogy chart to identify which quarrelsome prince, pretender, duke or earl is tormenting the king at that point.
An entertaining, insightful biography featuring a colorful cast of characters, led by the formidable Henry VII, who passed on the first untroubled succession in 80 years, launching the equally turbulent but more familiar Tudor renaissance.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9156-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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