A sad tale of possible interest to royalty and history buffs.
The life of yet another star-crossed, crazy European royal, capably told by the blueblood author of Living with Ghosts (1996).
Charlotte, beloved daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium, was considered a fine catch in the early 19th century. She was pretty, cultured, fabulously rich, and, as her Austrian suitor Archduke Maximilian put it, “very intelligent, which is a little tiresome, but I’m sure I’ll get over it.” Though his future father-in-law thought Maximilian a tyrannical braggart incapable of passing a mirror without checking himself in it—and, worse, interested only in Charlotte’s purse—the two married in 1857 and went off to rule the Italian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, ceded to Austria at the Congress of Vienna. It was, writes Prince Michael of Greece, “a poisoned gift”; the locals weren’t happy about being governed by foreigners, no matter how enlightened, and once Italy was reunified in 1859 they sent Maximilian and Charlotte packing. When Napoleon III of France sent them to Mexico to rule on his behalf, the Mexicans responded much like the Italians, putting Maximilian up against an adobe wall and executing him in 1867. Charlotte was not there to witness this indignity, having quietly gone mad and been shuttled off to Europe a few years earlier. Unhinged and paranoid, she lived until 1927 while her fortune mysteriously disappeared. The author writes of all this with sympathy and a certain world-weariness, sniffing that Maximilian might have enjoyed a different fate had the US given him, and not the tattered Mexican rebels, its support. He also suggests under his breath that Charlotte’s insanity may have resulted from the consumption (“unbeknownst to her, of course”) of aphrodisiac drugs, which Maximilian apparently consumed endlessly in an effort to become the father of his country.
A sad tale of possible interest to royalty and history buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-836-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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