A British historian brings to life Queen Matilda’s enormous accomplishments in consolidating early Norman rule.
Alongside her warrior husband, William I, Matilda brought legitimacy, a deeper degree of education, diplomatic savvy and artistic and religious flowering to the shared Norman-English throne. Borman (Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes Who Shaped the Virgin Queen, 2010, etc.) the chief executive of Britain’s Heritage Education Trust, fleshes out the personality of this fascinating woman, who set the steely precedent for subsequent English female sovereigns by displaying great longevity and stamina in a rough, paternalistic time. The daughter of Baldwin V, Count of Flanders, one of the most illustrious houses of Europe, Matilda, apparently diminutive and comely, demonstrated early on her extraordinarily strong will by not only pursuing a suitor on her own, and suffering rejection, but initially rejecting the suit of William of Normandy because he was an illegitimate son of Duke Robert I. Nonetheless, William won her, and their fruitful, long marriage established a powerful, solid dynasty in Normandy before William even cast his eyes covetously across the English Channel. Leaving her as regent to keep Normandy in line—the records show that she was a hands-on, effective ruler—William set out to conquer England. While his methods won few admirers from the English, Matilda proved politically astute, generously endowing monasteries, encouraging cultural integration and ensuring her last son, Henry, was born in England and viewed as its natural heir. Indeed, her fierce loyalty to her sons would prove nettlesome later in the marriage. A richly layered treatment of the stormy reign that yielded the incomparable Bayeux Tapestry and the Domesday Book.
Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-80814-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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