Hutchinson provides insight into Henry’s spoiled life and his self-orbiting attitude, but surely there was more to the young...
Biography of the younger life of the infamous Tudor king.
As the second son, Henry did not have a grand household like his brother, but his father, Henry VII, showered honors on him at an early age. Hutchinson (House of Treason: The Rise & Fall of a Tudor Dynasty, 2010, etc.) mentions little about either Henry’s relationship to his older brother or his brother’s death, which led to Henry becoming heir to the throne. Most of the author’s information comes from household accounts, which expose the vast amounts spent by both Henry and his father on pomp, play and show. The Tudors spent lavishly on themselves with money taken from their subjects by state blackmail. Henry’s taxes and penalties squeezed his nobles “until their very pips squeaked.” The king did not bother much with statehood, save the occasional beheading of an errant Yorkist or landowner whose estate he coveted. He was known to have state papers read to him at Mass, letting secretaries handle matters, and he was perfectly happy to leave everything to his Lord Chancellor, Wolsey, who took charge as Henry spent his time hunting, jousting and gambling. This is primarily the story of Henry VIII and his remarkable spending habits. His attempt at military genius was a complete failure, the only success being his ostentation at the peace treaty signing on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Truly, Henry just didn’t seem to care about anything except hawking, jousting, dancing and gaming, although other sources indicate broader interests and vast intelligence.
Hutchinson provides insight into Henry’s spoiled life and his self-orbiting attitude, but surely there was more to the young man than this.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01261-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
