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
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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