The Little Princes in the Tower (Mysterious Deaths)

Rating:
Summary: A great introductory text for this topic
Review: I consider this to be the book of choice for starting on this topic for either children or adults who wants a quick read. In fact, I would recommend this to anyone planning to read a more extensive biography or history as a helpful overview that will give them a good grounding from which to weigh other authors' theses. The author seems to lean toward Richard's guilt, but does an admirably fair job of laying out the various arguments. The text is lavishly illustrated with black-and-white pictures that make it more appealing, but the reader might want to be warned that most appear to 19th century and are inauthentic and sometimes wildly inaccurate. Fun, though. After this, one might want to move on to A.J. Pollard's Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, written for adults, but similarly informative and even-handed. I would avoid Alison Weir's erratic The Princes in the Tower until and unless the reader has a fairly good knowledge of the topic.

Rating:
Summary: Short, but highly informative
Review: On April 9, 1483, following the death of the English king, Edward IV, preparations were made to crown his 13-year-old son, Edward V. However, seventy-seven days later, when Richard III seized the throne, Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, were placed in the Tower of London, never to be seen again. This is the story of those two "little princes in the Tower."

In a short but succinct narrative, the author goes through the events surrounding the disappearance of the princes, laying the blame for their deaths squarely on Richard III. Then, alternate theories for who were responsible for the princes' deaths are examined. And finally, the book closes with three family trees of those involved, followed by a chronology of the events covered in the book.

This book is short (101 pages counting the chronology), but highly informative. The author takes great pains to give the reader an in-depth understand of what happened and why. Admittedly, the alternate theories are dismissed with little discussion, but nonetheless I do consider this a wonderful resource on the subject. Therefore, if you are interested in this tragic piece of history, then I highly recommend this book to you.