Faster; Cecily Neville

 

Okay, still trying to get used to this new Blogger format. It's a little weird. 

First up: "Faster" by Neal Bascomb. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, it covered the competitive early years of car racing. The German Mercedes dominated the field, and German race car drivers were considered the elitist of the elite. Driver Rene Dreyfus was Jewish, and therefore not welcome on most teams during the rise of the Third Reich. He partnered with an American heiress and a French car manufacturer and against all odds beat the Mercedes in a few key races. It was interesting and I learned a lot about early Grand Prix auto racing and how insanely dangerous it was. 

                                                                                                                                                                       Another Richard III book, this one about his mother, Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York (I'm also reading a book about his father, Richard, Duke of York, so the two intertwined quite a lot. At least until he died). Cecily and Richard were married when they were children, so it took a long time before they were living together as husband and wife and having kids, but once they started they didn't stop. Cecily had at least 12 children that we know about. Six died in infancy, making the future King Richard III the baby of the family when his little sister died. Not much is known for sure about Cecily Neville, even important women in Medieval England didn't get much documentation. Hers had to have been a sorrowful life at times, though, losing her husband and second son, Edmund, fighting the Lancasters. Even when her eldest son, Edward, was King, he was married to a woman she didn't like. Her son George so envied his older brother he tried to depose him and take the crown himself. And then there was poor Richard. Cecily lived for about a decade after Richard was murdered at Bosworth. In her will, she left a prayer book that most likely belonged to her youngest son to Henry Tudor's mother (and her cousin) Margaret Beaufort. I had a good laugh at that. The irony! John Ashdown-Hill also mentioned that the bones that are generally believed to be those of the Princes in the Tower most likely aren't: since finding Richard's bones, we know he had a full set of normal adult teeth. The bones that are often touted as his nephews' show a genetic dental deformity that for many years scholars thought they had inherited from Cecily Neville's line. But Richard didn't have it, so it makes the idea that those bones belonged to his nephews that much less likely. Interesting, as all Ashdown-Hill's books are.