Henry eventually assumed control of his realm, but it was too little, too late. Tudor fans will enjoy this outside-in...
Bringing to light the dangers of life in the service of Henry VIII.
As Borman (Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, 2016, etc.), England’s joint chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces and chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust, shows, Henry was a complex figure: fiercely loyal, treacherously fickle, short-tempered, demanding, and self-absorbed. Ascending the throne at a young age, he had little time for the duties of a king and was more inclined to frolicking with friends and leaving official affairs to ministers. The first of these was Thomas Wolsey, a cardinal and ambitious genius with a flexible conscience. As with many of Henry’s favorites, Wolsey was also low-born. He encouraged Henry’s extravagant lifestyle and easily manipulated the foolish youngster. Wolsey lasted through the annulment crisis and marriage to Anne Boleyn, but he was the first of many to fall. Then, Thomas Cromwell stepped in and used his considerable legal talents to secure Henry’s will. Afterward, it was Anne who engineered a divide between Cromwell and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer over the dissolution of the monasteries. Eventually, Cromwell dominated both the political and spiritual affairs of the king. Thomas More was another highly intelligent servant to the king, but he could not support the king’s “great matter” of succession and was beheaded. Cranmer was one of the few who supported the king in all his whims and demands, generally keeping his own council. He was one of the few who survived the king’s whims only to die on Queen Mary’s orders. Henry’s penchant to favor the low-born reflected his ever increasing paranoia. They would never have an eye on seizing the crown, so Henry favored ability over nobility, and the noble-born worked tirelessly to undermine those favorites. Borman skillfully shows Henry maneuvering his men like chess pieces; when they opposed him, they suffered violent downfalls.
Henry eventually assumed control of his realm, but it was too little, too late. Tudor fans will enjoy this outside-in biography as a different view of a complicated monarch.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2843-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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