Craig

Quality of research, and brilliance of writing.

Revisado: 02-17-24

This biography gets to the heart of who Lincoln truly was and how profoundly was the loss to our nation when his life ended when and how it did.

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A Love Letter to Cromwell

Revisado: 01-19-13

What did you like best about Wolf Hall? What did you like least?

If you hate Thomas More, you'll love this book. If you love Thomas Cromwell you'll also love this book. It is better read than heard, although the reader does an excellent job. It's just the nature of the narrative that makes listening pretty tedious, mainly because you must concentrate very hard in order to catch many of the transitions from subject-to-subject, person-to-person and place-to-place that happen so quickly it's like trying to follow the trail of a dog with firecrackers tied to its tail (something, in the spirit of Mantel's story, that Thomas More surely would have done to some poor dog if he'd had access to firecrackers at the time; then he would have taken the dog into his house where he would have whipped it mercilessly with his own scourging crop before drawing-and-quartering it and then burning it at the stake - all of this inside his house, except maybe the burning). Meanwhile, Cromwell would be out somewhere forming the first chapter of the ASPCA. Since I don't have a dog in the More-Cromwell fight, I really don't care what anyone thinks of either one of them, but it is a little irritating when an author finds it necessary to make one person a perfect villain in order to make another a perfect hero. Where's the ambiguity that is supposed to be essential to all serious fiction? Some reviewers have said that the book is peppered with humor, and I did smile a couple of times. Yet, alas, I was so busy straining to follow the story's transitions that I missed the funny parts or was simply too tired to laugh.

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