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 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
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