A gossipy, revealing story of the doomed Russian family’s fairy tale life told by an expert in the field.
The daughters of Czar Nicholas II and Alexandra are just the right subjects for Rappaport’s (A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy, 2012, etc.) specialties in Russian and 19th-century women’s history.
This story of the four girls—Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia—is not just a standard Russian history; witness the passing references to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 and the revolution of 1905. The author’s goal is to expose the characters of these girls, brought up very much in their mother’s vision of a simple, sheltered life. Rappaport manages to maintain reader interest even as she ticks off the repetitious tale of their boring lives: long walks with their father, sewing, study, tennis and heavy doses of religion. Each year, the family would leave the palace for vacations aboard the Shtandart, the imperial yacht, in the Baltic Sea or the Crimea, where they would pretty much do the same things. A visit to their English cousins on the Isle of Wight illustrated how little social freedom they actually had. Assassination was a way of life in Russia, and the Romanovs’ security network was so strict that the family members were restricted from leaving the ship. Their social lives were nonexistent, and their playmates were the sailors on the yacht or members of the czar’s guard. Alexandra’s weak constitution initially created the family’s isolation, which the populace saw as snobbery from the German-born czarina. Add the inept autocrat, Nicholas, the hemophilia of Czarevitch Alexei and the presence of the despised Rasputin for Alexandra’s obsessive protection, and the monarchy was ripe for a fall.
A gossipy, revealing story of the doomed Russian family’s fairy tale life told by an expert in the field.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02020-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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
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