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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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