A fine rags-to-riches-to–executioner’s-block story of a major figure of the English Reformation.
A mildly revisionist biography of Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540).
Long reviled as the evil genius who secured Henry VIII’s divorce from Catharine of Aragon and oversaw the looting of Catholic monasteries, Cromwell received spectacular rehabilitation in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall (2009) and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012). Agreeing that Mantel was onto something, Borman (Queen of the Conqueror: The Life of Matilda, Wife of William I, 2012, etc.), joint chief curator of historic royal palaces and chief executive of Britain’s Heritage Education Trust, writes an engrossing biography of a ruthless man who rose and fell in the service of a ruthless king, a path followed by dozens close to Henry. Son of a blacksmith, Cromwell traveled and worked on the continent as a young man. At age 30, as a successful London merchant and lawyer, he entered the household of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s leading adviser, and prospered. When Henry turned against Wolsey in 1529 (largely due to his reluctance to promote the king’s divorce), Cromwell stepped in. Fiercely dedicated to fulfilling Henry’s desires, Cromwell switched from appeals to the pope to manipulating Parliament and browbeating England’s clerical establishment. After years of political arm-twisting, he succeeded. Henry married Anne Boleyn and, far more significant, replaced the pope as head of the English church. Cromwell presided over the dissolution of church property, a windfall for the king, and successfully distanced himself from Anne as she fell from favor. His luck and life ran out in 1540 when enemies took advantage of Henry’s growing conservatism in matters of religious doctrine (he had less interest than Cromwell in Protestant reforms) and he disastrously supported Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves.
A fine rags-to-riches-to–executioner’s-block story of a major figure of the English Reformation.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123176
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
