A dry, unexciting account punctuated by all-too-fleeting moments of interest.
Slow-moving account of the life and the mythology surrounding French princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte (1778–1851).
In the book’s early chapters, Nagel (Humanities/Marymount Manhattan Coll.; Mistress of the Elgin Marbles: A Biography of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin, 2004, etc.) is consumed with detailing the fate of Marie-Thérèse’s mother, Marie Antoinette. These sections are occasionally enlivened by intriguing asides about the young Marie-Thérèse, such as the special sign language she developed to communicate with her parents in prison and the impact on her own development of her mother’s bravery in the face of the French Revolution. The princess doesn’t gain her biographer’s full attention until her escape to Vienna following the end of the Reign of Terror. Despite romantic advances from Austria’s Archduke Karl, she married her first cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, “because at the bottom of her heart she hoped that the Bourbon monarchy would return to France.” (It did, in 1815, but the Revolution of 1830 ensured that Marie-Thérèse would never be queen.) Nagel speculates on rumors of d’Angoulême’s homosexuality, examines a trip Marie-Thérèse took to her parents’ burial ground on her return to France and discusses a period when the 42-year-old princess mistakenly believed that she was pregnant. Somewhere in the folds of this perfunctory history lies an intriguing question: Was Marie-Thérèse replaced by a doppelgänger on her release from prison in 1795? Nagel comes to grips with this question only in the book’s afterword. There, she examines DNA testing and picks apart the scant details regarding Sophie Botta, the woman many believed was the “real” Marie-Thérèse. The author reprints correspondence written by both women, finding a marked difference in their handwriting. She signs off with the firm assertion that Botta “was not Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, daughter of Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI of France.”
A dry, unexciting account punctuated by all-too-fleeting moments of interest.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-057-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
