An entertaining challenge to a century of misconceptions.
The vilified heir to the Hapsburg throne wins a touching rehabilitation in this nonscholarly look at his love match and sad demise.
King (A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York, 2008, etc.) and Woolmans (25 Chapters of My Life: The Memoirs of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, 2010) find a juicy story in the scandalous romance of the Hapsburg emperor’s nephew, whose marriage pact with Sophie Chotek may have helped contribute to his assassination in Sarajevo. By 1900, the old reactionary Emperor Franz Joseph I had been on the throne of the Austro-Hungarian confederation for more than 50 years, outliving several younger heirs to the throne, including his own son, Rudolf, who committed suicide. The emperor never liked his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, who was a cautious, piously Catholic, army-trained 35-year-old with “watery blue eyes” and who may have harbored reformist tendencies. The one daring act of his life was the choice of Sophie as his bride. A serene, mature Bohemian aristocrat, daughter of an impoverished diplomat, she was unequal to the station of an emperor’s wife. Despite the emperor’s injunction against marrying her, Franz Ferdinand finagled an official agreement that allowed him to marry Sophie if he signed a “morganatic union,” which prohibited her from inheriting rights to the Hapsburg throne. Indeed, while the marriage seemed wonderfully happy, resulting in a loving, bourgeois home life, the exclusion of Sophie from nearly all official duties next to her husband caused the couple nearly 15 years of torment and added to the general animosity against the couple in the kingdom. The ill-planned visit of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie to Bosnia “to attend maneuvers” is depicted in this light-pedaling study as a “colossal” setup.
An entertaining challenge to a century of misconceptions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00016-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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