General Books - Page 5

The Children of Henry VIII

Alison Weir

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This is real history - not a whitewashed novel. I loved it! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Recently I've become interested in the Tudors. I've been following the series on television and have also read a few historical novels. This book, however, is different because it is not a novel. It is a biography. All I can say is WOW - truth really is stranger than fiction - and much more fascinating.

It starts with a short history of the three Tudor siblings. Then, we meet King Edward VI I, a child being manipulated by the men in power. We get to know him as he grows more and more aware of his own power. He believes in the Protestant religion and he and his advisers have put restraints on Catholicism. Of course his oldest sister, Mary, who is in her late twenties and has been raised Catholic is unhappy and resists all the new laws, but he is firm in his own beliefs. By the age of 15, though, he is dying. It is a painful and tragic death and takes a long time. The reader is not spared any of the details. In order to keep England Protestant, on his dying bed, he chooses the next in succession - his cousin Lady Jane Grey, merely 15 years old at the time. She didn't want to be Queen, but was forced into it. Her reign was short (only nine days) and tragic. Soon, Mary became Queen.

This all seems so simple, but, it fact it is quite complicated. The book describes the many plots and subplots, intrigues and politics of the time. Long imprisonments and beheadings were common. And later, during Mary's reign, Protestant heretics were burned at the stake. The reader is not spared any of the grisly details. There were times I got the shivers but I was glad this was not whitewashed history. This was real, it happened, and the writing was so good that I felt I was right there. The author managed to insert constant historical references, including actual letters, into the narrative.

I learned a lot. I didn't know that Queen Mary had been married to a Spanish prince. I hadn't realized that the younger sister, Elizabeth, had spent much of her life imprisoned. I didn't understand the complexities of the constant warfare with other countries. And, even though I knew about the division between the Protestants and Catholics, this book really described the ends that Mary went to in order to force Catholicism on the English people.

It's all here, packed into a mere 366 pages. Well, almost. The book ends with Mary's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne. It then simply mentions that Elizabeth enjoyed a 45-year reign. I definitely plan to read some other biography about that reign. But I now have the background to understand it better.

I loved this book and was sorry it ended. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

The royal family may have its problems these days, but as Alison Weir reminds us in this cohesive and impeccably researched book, the nobility of old England could be both loveless and ruthless. Weir, an expert in the period and author of a book on Henry's VIII wives, focuses on the children of Henry VIII who reigned successively after his death in 1547: Edward VI, Mary I ("Bloody Mary") and Elizabeth I. The three shared little--living in separate homes--except for a familial legacy of blood and terror. This is exciting history and fascinating reading about a family of mythic proportions.

A Little History of the World

E. H. Gombrich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited by a publishing acquaintance to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser was published in Vienna to immediate success, and is now available in seventeen languages across the world.

Toward the end of his long life, Gombrich embarked upon a revision and, at last, an English translation. A Little History of the World presents his lively and involving history to English-language readers for the first time. Superbly designed and freshly illustrated, this is a book to be savored and collected.

In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In between emerges a colorful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind’s experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity’s achievements and an acute witness to its frailties.

The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history.

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

Ian W. Toll

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 82 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

With a Little Editing, Could Have Been a Five 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is really the history of the US Navy from the end of the Revolution to the end of the 'War of 1812'. It's the story of the growth of a service dealing with a niggardly Congress and trying to get 'respect' of the rest of the world. The new US was considered an upstart by the strongest navy in the world (His Britannic Majesties) and an anomaly to the Barbary Pirates of North Africa.

Toll has done a monumental job in reading through the Navy Archives of both the US and Britain, and many of the newspapers of the contemporary times. He has developed new details as to the character of the early men who ran the Navy and commanded its' ships. He does his best when describing battles and the problems of getting Congress to understand the usefulness of a 'deep water' fleet. He suffers when he over- describes the provisioning and outfitting of the ships and the recruiting of sailors.

Reading some pages was like looking at a list from a Chandler's shop and should have been put in notes. Some of the quotes are overly long and not completely relevant to the theme he is elaborating. He is best when he gives us the 'rest of the story' on some of the people who pass through tangentially but are important to the story. All in all a good presentation (just not a great one).

Zeb Kantrowitz

Editorial Review:

"A fluent, intelligent history...give[s] the reader a feel for the human quirks and harsh demands of life at sea."—New York Times Book Review

Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military became the most divisive issue facing the new government. The founders—particularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adams—debated fiercely. Would a standing army be the thin end of dictatorship? Would a navy protect from pirates or drain the treasury and provoke hostility? Britain alone had hundreds of powerful warships.

From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliff-hanger campaign against Tripoli, to the war that shook the world in 1812, Ian W. Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of Founding Brothers and the narrative flair of Patrick O'Brian. 16 pages of illustrations.

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

Tom Gjelten

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A unique history of Cuba, captured in the life and times of the famous rum dynasty

The Bacardis of Cuba, builders of a rum distillery and a worldwide brand, came of age with their nation and helped define what it meant to be Cuban. Across five generations, the Bacardi family has held fast to its Cuban identity, even in exile from the country for whose freedom they once fought. Now National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten tells the dramatic story of one family, its business, and its nation, a 150-year tale with the sweep and power of an epic.

The Bacardi clan--patriots and bon vivants, entrepreneurs and intellectuals--provided an example of business and civic leadership in its homeland for nearly a century. From the fight for Cuban independence from Spain in the 1860s to the rise of Fidel Castro and beyond, there is no chapter in Cuban history in which the Bacardis have not played a role. In chronicling the saga of this remarkable family and the company that bears its name, Tom Gjelten describes the intersection of business and power, family and politics, community and exile.

Time Planet Earth: An Illustrated History

Editors of Time Magazine

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The third planet from the sun is mankind's home - but how well do you know it? Its molten core, for instance, is hotter than the surface of the sun. Now, TIME presents an unrivaled portrait of Planet Earth: its violent history, its vast oceans, its constantly changing geology, its life-sheltering atmosphere, its fascinating life forms, and its imperiled climate.

TIME joins scientists in the field, visits with indigenous people and consults with experts to report on the biggest story of this year and every year: Planet Earth. And we visit the Earth's extremes: the longest rivers, tallest mountains and driest deserts on the planet. This beautifully illustrated volume, featuring the work of award-winning photographers, presents a portrait of our wondrous planet--and of all the beings that call it home--that is revelatory, awe-inspiring and essential.

* Perfect for those who want simply to enjoy beautiful photographs or those who want to learn the history, geology, geography, and life forms on this planet
* Divided into broad major sections, containing spreads that function as individual units and as a larger theme
* Includes fascinating, informative graphic spreads from TIME's celebrated graphic artists--from the science of wildfires to what happens inside a hurricane
* Features multiple points of entry: a spread might contain three or four sidebars--trivia, definitions, scientific debates, history, locations, Top Ten lists--all guaranteed to add fun and information

The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories

Herodotus

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the editor of the widely praised The Landmark Thucydides, a new Landmark Edition of The Histories by Herodotus, the greatest classical work of history ever written.

Herodotus was a Greek historian living in Ionia during the fifth century BCE. He traveled extensively through the lands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and collected stories, and then recounted his experiences with the varied people and cultures he encountered. Cicero called him “the father of history,” and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose that harks back to the time of oral tradition, Herodotus set a standard for narrative nonfiction that continues to this day.

In The Histories, Herodotus chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire and its dramatic war with the Greek city-states. Within that story he includes rich veins of anthropology, ethnography, geology, and geography, pioneering these fields of study, and explores such universal themes as the nature of freedom, the role of religion, the human costs of war, and the dangers of absolute power.

Ten years in the making, The Landmark Herodotus gives us a new, dazzling translation by Andrea L. Purvis that makes this remarkable work of literature more accessible than ever before. Illustrated, annotated, and filled with maps, this edition also includes an introduction by Rosalind Thomas and twenty-one appendices written by scholars at the top of their fields, covering such topics as Athenian government, Egypt, Scythia, Persian arms and tactics, the Spartan state, oracles, religion, tyranny, and women.

Like The Landmark Thucydides before it, The Landmark Herodotus is destined to be the most readable and comprehensively useful edition of The Histories available.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

Art Spiegelman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 150 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Some historical events simply beggar any attempt at description--the Holocaust is one of these. Therefore, as it recedes and the people able to bear witness die, it becomes more and more essential that novel, vigorous methods are used to describe the indescribable. Examined in these terms, Art Spiegelman's Maus is a tremendous achievement, from a historical perspective as well as an artistic one.

Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiegelman compels the reader to imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.

This is neither easy nor pleasant. However, Vladek Spiegelman and his wife Anna are resourceful heroes, and enough acts of kindness and decency appear in the tale to spur the reader onward (we also know that the protagonists survive, else reading would be too painful). This first volume introduces Vladek as a happy young man on the make in pre-war Poland. With outside events growing ever more ominous, we watch his marriage to Anna, his enlistment in the Polish army after the outbreak of hostilities, his and Anna's life in the ghetto, and then their flight into hiding as the Final Solution is put into effect. The ending is stark and terrible, but the worst is yet to come--in the second volume of this Pulitzer Prize-winning set. --Michael Gerber

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

Kate Summerscale

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.

At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914

David McCullough

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Total reviews: 131 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

On December 31, 1999, after nearly a century of rule, the United States officially ceded ownership of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama. That nation did not exist when, in the mid-19th century, Europeans first began to explore the possibilities of creating a link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the narrow but mountainous isthmus; Panama was then a remote and overlooked part of Colombia.

All that changed, writes David McCullough in his magisterial history of the Canal, in 1848, when prospectors struck gold in California. A wave of fortune seekers descended on Panama from Europe and the eastern United States, seeking quick passage on California-bound ships in the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, built to serve that traffic, was soon the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange. To build a 51-mile-long ship canal to replace that railroad seemed an easy matter to some investors. But, as McCullough notes, the construction project came to involve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations over four decades; eventually those workers, laboring in oppressive heat in a vast malarial swamp, removed enough soil and rock to build a pyramid a mile high. In the early years, they toiled under the direction of French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who went bankrupt while pursuing his dream of extending France's empire in the Americas. The United States then entered the picture, with President Theodore Roosevelt orchestrating the purchase of the canal--but not before helping foment a revolution that removed Panama from Colombian rule and placed it squarely in the American camp.

The story of the Panama Canal is complex, full of heroes, villains, and victims. McCullough's long, richly detailed, and eminently literate book pays homage to an immense undertaking. --Gregory McNamee

The Places In Between

Rory Stewart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 157 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Meh 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

What Mr. Stewart did was brave, and interesting in theory, but the narrative that emerges is unavoidably monotonous, as the areas he walked through are pretty much the armpit of the world. Blah blah snow blah grudgingly given sleep space in the mosque blah left the next day blah Kalashnikovs blah they threw rocks at my dog again. I was hoping for a much more eventful story as I love travel writing and have been wanting to know more about that part of the world... and it turns out, not surprisingly, that it's primitive and poor and cold and isolated and just not real interesting. And this is not to denigrate Mr. Stewart: on the contrary he should be admired for telling it like it is.

Editorial Review:

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.

Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.