One of the great, nearly forgotten enigmas of English history, presented, more often than not, with verve. Still, even Henry...
A vivid, if overlong, biographical study of identity and deception in Tudor England.
In the gallery of the world’s grand impostors, the handsome, twentysomething young man who sought the English throne as Richard, Duke of York, may have been the most audacious. He claimed to be the son of King Edward IV and the younger of the two princes imprisoned in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard III. Miraculously, he said, he survived a murder attempt and would now take back the throne from usurper Henry VII. Was it true? Although English opinion assumed the princes died, definitive evidence has not emerged to this day. Yet several key members of Europe’s royalty—including Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Emperor Maximilian, Charles VII of France, and Duchess Margaret of Burgundy—backed the “Duke of York.” After eight years in which he allied with James IV of Scotland and even invaded England three times, “Richard” was finally captured, confessed that he was Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Flemish boatman, and was hanged in 1499 as a common criminal. Economist senior editor Wroe (A Fool and His Money, 1995, etc.) sorts out Warbeck’s conflicting stories, as well as Henry’s shifting efforts to counter this phantom menace to his rule. Best of all, she fills in the margins of this scantily documented episode with intriguing analyses of 15th-century courting customs, fashions (wearing silk, at a time when no one below the rank of knight could wear it, bolstered Warbeck’s credibility), and, most crucially, a cultural atmosphere that encouraged make-believe. (“Navigators often did not know which country they were in, what adjoined it, where the rivers led, or what its nature was; but, not knowing, they pretended to.”)
One of the great, nearly forgotten enigmas of English history, presented, more often than not, with verve. Still, even Henry VIII—a more controversial and consequential figure—doesn’t always get such in-depth treatment.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6033-8
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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