Superficial history related in tone-deaf, elitist prose.
The author’s ongoing chronicle of royalty (The Serpent and the Moon, 2004, etc.) continues with the tales of poor little princesses married off abroad.
Some of them—can you imagine?—lived among people who didn’t speak French! Or hadn’t seen operas! Princess Michael begins by noting that she’s terribly interested in political history, but that she prefers what she calls “the lighter side.” There aren’t too many juicy tidbits among the profiles (even in the section about Marie Antoinette). We learn lots about what these royal expatriates wore on important occasions. Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky, for example, looked great in “white moiré, trimmed with Honiton lace” at her 1858 wedding to Prussian King Frederick III. We learn a little about what they ate (pretty much whatever they wanted) and sometimes what they thought. She tells us that Danish princess Alexandra, married to Vickie’s scapegrace brother Bertie, Prince of Wales, inherited her interest in politics from her father; ten pages later, the author credits Alexandra’s mother. Princess Michael cannot shed or even conceal her belief that royalty are just better than the rest of us. When Austrian archduchess Leopoldina arrived in Brazil to marry its Portuguese ruler in 1817, she found no culture there. Former French Empress Eugénie was heartbroken when her exiled son died in 1879 on a noble mission “to conquer the troublesome African tribes.” It was a “tragedy” that cultured Vicky had to live among louts in Germany, especially since her son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, grew up to be one of them.
Superficial history related in tone-deaf, elitist prose.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9637-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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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