A sad tale of possible interest to royalty and history buffs.
The life of yet another star-crossed, crazy European royal, capably told by the blueblood author of Living with Ghosts (1996).
Charlotte, beloved daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium, was considered a fine catch in the early 19th century. She was pretty, cultured, fabulously rich, and, as her Austrian suitor Archduke Maximilian put it, “very intelligent, which is a little tiresome, but I’m sure I’ll get over it.” Though his future father-in-law thought Maximilian a tyrannical braggart incapable of passing a mirror without checking himself in it—and, worse, interested only in Charlotte’s purse—the two married in 1857 and went off to rule the Italian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, ceded to Austria at the Congress of Vienna. It was, writes Prince Michael of Greece, “a poisoned gift”; the locals weren’t happy about being governed by foreigners, no matter how enlightened, and once Italy was reunified in 1859 they sent Maximilian and Charlotte packing. When Napoleon III of France sent them to Mexico to rule on his behalf, the Mexicans responded much like the Italians, putting Maximilian up against an adobe wall and executing him in 1867. Charlotte was not there to witness this indignity, having quietly gone mad and been shuttled off to Europe a few years earlier. Unhinged and paranoid, she lived until 1927 while her fortune mysteriously disappeared. The author writes of all this with sympathy and a certain world-weariness, sniffing that Maximilian might have enjoyed a different fate had the US given him, and not the tattered Mexican rebels, its support. He also suggests under his breath that Charlotte’s insanity may have resulted from the consumption (“unbeknownst to her, of course”) of aphrodisiac drugs, which Maximilian apparently consumed endlessly in an effort to become the father of his country.
A sad tale of possible interest to royalty and history buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-836-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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