Trevelyan rightly concludes that “we cannot fail to be awed by the vastness of his aspirations.” Readers with an interest in...
The best place for Sir Walter Raleigh, the English historian A.L. Rowse once observed, was the Tower of London. This well-written life by namesake and descendant Trevelyan makes a long but engaging rebuttal.
When Raleigh died in 1618, executed, in a casebook example of double jeopardy, for crimes supposedly committed many years before, he was a deeply unpopular man. “His performance on the scaffold,” writes retired publisher Trevelyan (Rome ’44, not reviewed, etc.), “was a great piece of theater, but it is impossible not to be won over by it, as indeed were all, or nearly all, his spectators.” As a result, and thanks to his wife Bess Throckmorton’s ceaseless labors, Raleigh’s reputation was almost immediately restored, and over the next half-century or so Raleigh became a hero of the republican cause. Not that he was an antimonarchic exemplar; Trevelyan acknowledges that good Sir Walter served the Crown as it suited, though without the anti-Catholic zeal of so much of Elizabeth’s court. (“There are no such things as wars of religion,” he wisely observed, “only civil wars. The condition of man was never bettered by them.”) Raleigh, however, was also careful to look after his own interests first, and his exploits as a privateer and explorer earned him envy and infamy. Trevelyan catalogues Raleigh’s many accomplishments: he was a poet of some distinction; he was a chemist and sort-of-doctor who fitted up his cell in the Tower of London as a laboratory and concocted a cure-all called “Balsam of Guinea,” the popularity of which “lasted for the rest of the century”; he was a great soldier, sailor, and explorer, a parliamentarian and historian; and, perhaps most famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view), he introduced tobacco to England, and possibly the potato to Ireland. All signal achievements, to be sure, but not enough to save the great swashbuckler from the intrigues of the English court.
Trevelyan rightly concludes that “we cannot fail to be awed by the vastness of his aspirations.” Readers with an interest in the man and his time will find this vast account a pleasure.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7502-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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