An easy-reading, lightweight history lesson. Farquhar’s tales of totalitarianism make one wonder if the secrets behind so...
More tales from the nasty lives of global royalty.
Farquhar (Behind the Palace Doors: Five Centuries of Sex, Adventure, Vice, Treasury, and the Folly from Royal Britain, 2011, etc.) continues his chronicles of members of royal families and their strange, often reprehensible foibles, which demolished governments, lives and countries. This book, covering the horrors of Russia’s 300 years of Romanov rule, concentrates on the totalitarian autocrats and their beastly reigns, during which they rewarded their favorites with thousands of serfs. Even great accomplishments, such as Peter the Great’s navy and Westernization, are swept aside with stories of dictatorial actions such as his banning of beards and his personal torture of prisoners. Likewise, the author portrays Catherine the Great in light of her usurpation and the death of her husband, Peter III, as well as her long list of lovers. The book also tells the stories of the violence against the czars and their supporters, not least the multiple attempts on the life of Alexander II. It took a bomb to finally eliminate the man who actually freed the serfs. The czars who were not congenitally cruel and repressive, like Nicholas I, were certifiably mad or grossly ineffective. Farquhar devotes almost a third of the book to Nicholas and Alexandra, perhaps due to the fact there is so much material from which to choose. Nicholas was weak-willed, introverted and completely under the thumb of his despised wife. Both were under the spell of Rasputin, who claimed to heal their son Alexei’s bouts with hemophilia. Alexandra’s shyness was construed as pride and haughtiness, but she controlled Nicholas and his government to their desperate ends.
An easy-reading, lightweight history lesson. Farquhar’s tales of totalitarianism make one wonder if the secrets behind so many centuries of cruelty could be in the DNA.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7905-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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