Moments of fun mixed with a bit of edification.
Novelist and chronicler of royalty Carroll (Notorious Royal Marriages, 2010, etc.) unearths the legendary bad behavior of some members of the royal class.
“Disobedience is my joy!” screams the dedication page of this workmanlike exposé. The quote is attributed to the late Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, whose romantic scandals of the 1960s and ’70s gave her sister, Queen Elizabeth, a sour royal pucker. Margaret’s shenanigans offer a somewhat lame conclusion to the tales of a dozen “bad seeds” chronicled here, including more notorious specimens such as Vlad the Impaler and Pauline Bonaparte. The subjects are endlessly fascinating, though the writing is fairly pedestrian and dry. King John thought nothing of betraying his father, Henry II, and became such a failure as king that his barons rose up to force him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. The medieval Transylvanian count Vlad, on whom Bram Stoker based his Dracula character, so effectively used his impaling technique to display his ferocity that the invading Turkish sultan exclaimed in amazement that he “could not win the land from a man who does such great things and above all knows how to exploit his rule and that over his subjects in this way.” Ivan the Terrible killed his own heir in a fit of rage and forced the miscarriage of his son’s wife. Carroll also profiles a host of bratty ladies, including the comely Lettice Knollys, who lured away Elizabeth I’s favorite, Robert Dudley, even though he had a well-established roving eye; Erzsébet Báthory, a Hungarian countess who “made the Marquis de Sade look like Mother Teresa” because of her penchant for torturing peasant girls just for fun; and the highly promiscuous Pauline Bonaparte, the favorite youngest sister to Napoleon.
Moments of fun mixed with a bit of edification.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-451-23221-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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