An instructive European history that effectively shows “the influence of [Victoria’s] matchmaking on the remarkable rise of...
Digging deeper into Queen Victoria’s extensive brood, their intermarriages, and their wars.
Prince Albert’s great plan was to intermarry his children with European royal houses to spread the liberalism of England and prevent wars. That was not to be. World War I ended or fatally harmed the monarchies of most of Victoria’s grandchildren. The cousinhood proved to be more harmful than powerful. The great shifts in politics in the early 20th century and the clash of the poor and the wealthy gave rise to anarchists and increasing instances of assassination. BBC producer Cadbury (Princes at War: The Bitter Battle Inside Britain’s Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII, 2015, etc.) concentrates on Victoria’s attempts to find a suitable bride for Eddy, the Prince of Wales, pushing primarily German princesses. Victoria’s love of all things German accounts for her deep distrust and dislike of all things Russian, particularly after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Equally important to Victoria were the marriages of her late daughter’s children. Her death left her mother feeling closer to her granddaughters than to her own children. She hoped to wed her favorite, Alix, to Eddy. At her sister’s wedding to Grand Duke Sergei in St. Petersburg, Alix met the czarevich, Nicholas, who captured her heart. Princess Victoria, the eldest daughter, was married to reformer Frederick II, German emperor and king of Prussia. Alas, his reign was desperately short, and he was succeeded by his bellicose, even maniacal son, Wilhelm II. Victoria’s final choice for Eddy’s wife, Mary of Teck, a rank outsider—she was not a royal—might have worked out, except Eddy died unexpectedly. In this enjoyable story for fans of royal machinations, Cadbury ably shows not just the successes, but also the damage inflicted by Victoria’s single-mindedness.
An instructive European history that effectively shows “the influence of [Victoria’s] matchmaking on the remarkable rise of the royal dynasty.”Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-846-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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