A great book for history fans seeking illumination on the connections of European royalty.
The story of how one remarkable woman’s drive to survive secured the succession of the British crown to this day.
Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662), daughter of King James I, was 6 years old when her father, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded Queen Elizabeth I as the king of England. Elizabeth was married to Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, a marriage many considered to be beneath her royal status. The reasoning behind the marriage was that James I would support Frederick’s claim to become king of Bohemia. In his usual manner, it was a claim that James promised but never delivered. The Bohemian revolt of 1618 brought an offer to Frederick to assume the throne, which he quickly did. Unfortunately, the Hapsburgs and Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand took umbrage and quickly recovered the kingdom. Frederick and Elizabeth ruled for only one season, thus the title of Winter King and Queen. Living at the court of the Prince of Orange, they struggled to regain their titles. Fortunately, the Prince of Orange left Elizabeth a significant piece of the West India Company, which contributed to a new army to regain Frederick’s realm. However, it was not to be, and then came the Thirty Years’ War, which precipitated Frederick’s death in 1632. Though the narrative could have devolved into a complicated morass of intertwined royal families, Goldstone (The Rival Queens: Catherine de' Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, 2016, etc.), a seasoned historian, effectively keeps the lines clear as she relates Elizabeth’s repeated, frustrated attempts to secure strong marriages for her children under trying circumstances. Her children’s stories are fascinating, as well—e.g., one daughter had a long correspondence with Descartes, another with Leibniz. Ultimately, it was her youngest daughter, Sophia, who secured the family’s future as the Electress of Hanover.
A great book for history fans seeking illumination on the connections of European royalty.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-38791-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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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