Tagged: nonfiction
The Kindness of Strangers (True Stories to Inspire you this Christmas)
Merry Christmas!
Instead of the usual simple holiday message I thought that this year I’d spread the Christmas cheer through a series of stories highlighting the kindness of strangers. The following stories are about what seem like everyday acts of kindness to the total strangers involved, but they made a huge difference to me. So I hope that on this Christmas you’ll read these stories and be inspired to perform little acts of kindness all year long.
Breaking the Silence
I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 when a relative of mine took my sister and I out to lunch in the city. My little sister is only 3 years younger than myself but I’ve always acted like her protector, especially around this relative. He could be gruff with us kids and sometimes was downright cruel, as he was on this particular occasion.
The restaurant (I don’t remember what it was called) was having a buffet and this relative piled food on my little sister’s plate. I was able to escape this because I could serve myself. I quickly finished my lunch, but my little sister, who wasn’t really hungry to begin with, couldn’t finish. She said she was done eating and asked our relative if we could go, but he said she had to finish everything on her plate. He then went for a cigarette break, leaving my sister (who was now crying) and myself at the table. Continue reading
Spotlight: The Watchers by Stephen Alford
Spotlight is my new regular Saturday feature in which I highlight a book I really enjoyed or am eagerly waiting for. In this case, it’s a great nonfiction book about spying in the reign of Elizabeth I called The Watchers.
In a Europe aflame with wars of religion and dynastic conflicts, Elizabeth I came to a throne encircled by menace. To the Catholic powers of Europe, England was a heretic pariah state and her queen was “Jezebel,” the bastard offspring of Henry VIII’s illegal second marriage. The pope denounced her; the kings of France and Spain conspired to destroy her, their plans culminating in the Spanish Armada. Many of the Queen’s own subjects plotted her overthrow—or her assassination.
[Full blurb available on my review.]
Since The Mad Reviewer is YA (or at least adult novels that can be read by teens), I don’t get to read nearly as much nonfiction as I would like. That’s why I’m so glad Bloomsbury Publishing contacted me about reviewing Stephen Alford’s second book.
Although the writing style was a bit choppy at times because Alford jumped all over the place to fit all the spies into his narrative, The Watchers is one of the better nonfiction books I’ve read. Despite some choppy sections, overall it’s well written and engaging, but most of all, informative. The amount of research that went into The Watchers must have been staggering, and Alford has an entire section of the book dedicated to citing sources. I thought I knew a bit about the reign of Elizabeth I and the role spies played in it, but I really had no idea.
What I thought was unusual was that Alford stayed pretty neutral throughout the book. He explained things from the points of view of the Protestant English spies and from the points of view of the Catholics who worked to overthrow Elizabeth or simply survive. We see the plots by Catholics to kill Elizabeth I, but we also get to see the horrors any captured Catholics (or suspected Catholics) faced. Balance is important in nonfiction and Alford certainly achieved it.
If you’re looking for an informative but engaging read, I highly recommend picking up The Watchers.
The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
In a Europe aflame with wars of religion and dynastic conflicts, Elizabeth I came to a throne encircled by menace. To the Catholic powers of Europe, England was a heretic pariah state and her queen was “Jezebel,” the bastard offspring of Henry VIII’s illegal second marriage. The pope denounced her; the kings of France and Spain conspired to destroy her, their plans culminating in the Spanish Armada. Many of the Queen’s own subjects plotted her overthrow—or her assassination.
If Elizabeth’s reign was a golden age, then, it was also a precarious one that required unrelenting surveillance by Her Majesty’s secret service. Headed by the brilliant, enigmatic and widely feared Sir Francis Walsingham, the Elizabethan security network willingly deployed every dark art: spies, disinformation, double agents, cryptography, and torture.
Delving deeply into secret files, Stephen Alford offers a chillingly vivid depiction of Elizabethan espionage. In his company we follow Her Majesty’s agents through the streets of London and Rome, and into the dank cells of the Tower. Alford brings to life this shadowy world, where no one could be trusted and a single mistake could have changed England’s history. The Watchers is a riveting exploration of loyalty, faith, betrayal, and deception with the highest possible stakes, in a world poised between the Middle Ages and modernity.
[Full disclosure: Bloomsbury Publishing sent me a free print copy in exchange for an honest review of this book.]
I don’t read nearly as much nonfiction as I would like, so The Watchers was both a refreshing change from YA novels and a great book in its own right. For someone who knows a decent amount about the Tudors and Medieval England, I was shocked at how big of a role spying played back then. It wasn’t just basic spying either: it was sophisticated and at times, incredibly complicated. Stephen Alford has documented the lives of some of the main players in the spy game, from the talented to the incompetent, the eccentric to the boring.
Although Alford’s writing can get a bit choppy here and there as he jumps from spy to spy, he does tie things up well at the end of the chapters and at the very end of the book. Despite the head-hopping, the writing style itself was very engaging for a nonfiction writer and made The Watchers far more enjoyable.To illustrate his point that spying was very important in Tudor England, he had a very lengthy introduction imagining a scenario in which spies did not exist and Elizabeth I really had been assassinated. I would have liked for the introduction to be cut down slightly, but Alford certainly did make his point well.
One thing I really liked about The Watchers is that Alford isn’t telling a completely one-sided story of the struggle of Protestants to protect their queen from evil Catholics. We get to see how the Protestant agents felt about their missions, but also get to see things from the point of view of Catholic exiles. it’s rare to find such balanced nonfiction these days, but Alford managed it. The political triumphs of courtiers like Lord Burghley are balanced by accounts of the terrible torture captured Catholics faced. Alford does not depict a picture of a Golden Age as most books about Elizabethan England seem to and we get to see that the ugly side of the Golden Age was quite ugly at times. It’s nice to find a more realistic portrayal of the times.
Overall, The Watchers is a great book for both newcomers to history and old hats at it. Personally, I’m looking forward to any future books Stephen Alford publishes.
I give this book 4.5/5 stars.
The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction by James Alexander Thom
(Cover picture courtesy of Heritage Key.)
While a historian stands firmly planted in the present and looks back into the past, a historical novelist has a more immediate task: to set readers in the midst of bygone events and lead them forward, allowing them to live and feel the wonderment, fear, hope, triumph, and pain as if they were there.
In The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction, best-selling author James Alexander Thom (Follow the River, From Sea to Shining Sea, Sign–Talker) gives you the tools you need to research and create stories born from the past that will move and inspire modern readers. His comprehensive approach includes lessons on how to:
- Find and use historical archives and conduct physical field research
- Re-construct the world of your novel, including people and voices, physical environments, and cultural context
- Achieve verisimilitude in speech, action, setting, and description
- Seamlessly weave historical fact with your own compelling plot ideas
With wit and candor, Thom’s detailed instruction, illuminating personal experience, and invaluable insights culled from discussions with other trusted historical writers will guide you to craft a novel that is true to what was then, when then was now.
Well, to close off History Month here on The Mad Reviewer, I decided to review this non-fiction book on how to write historical fiction. Because why not? I picked this book up on speculation because I’m an amateur writer in my free time and I love to write historical fiction (which ends up being utter crap). So now I can review it from a reviewer’s and a writer’s perspective.
James Alexander Thom is a man that doesn’t fool around when he writes; he never sugarcoats the truth. The truth is, you will have to do you research on somewhere besides the internet, you likely will have to talk to experts and your journey to writing your novel will be a long one that isn’t always rewarding. To help readers understand what writing in the past is like, he uses a wonderful ‘river of time’ analogy that is surprisingly helpful. He gives practical advice on how to find good sources, dialogue (which always seems to be a problem in historical fiction), setting and historical accuracy. In my opinion, he gets a bit too high-and-mighty when it comes to historical accuracy, but that’s to be expected when you’ve been writing historical fiction as long as he has.
The best part of The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction is the real-world examples of the lessons he’s trying to teach prospective writers. One of the best examples he gives is when his wife was writing about her girlhood hero and got frustrated halfway through the research because she wasn’t the perfect hero she thought she would be. But when she researched more, she realized that the woman was flawed, imperfect, but tried to make the best of her situation and do what was right for her people.
That brings up an important point: historical figures likely are not who you thought they were once you start conducting research. For example, when I wrote a short story about Cleopatra, I did a lot of research. At first I despised her for being so stupid as to lose Egypt to the Romans, but when you look at her whole situation, it was amazing she held on as long as she did. That’s why James Alexander Thom emphasizes the importance of research both online and offline.
This is probably the best book I’ve read on writing historical fiction. I’d highly recommend it.
I give this book 4.5/5 stars.