The intimate correspondence between Nicholas and Alexandra exposes the political naiveté of the ill-fated Romanovs while revealing their deep, loving relationship.
The late 19th century witnessed a spate of assassinations in Russia, which caused the royals to avoid appearing in public unless absolutely necessary. Nicholas avoided confrontation by quietly listening, nodding and smiling, while completely ignoring the advice of his counselors. In an attempt to understand his strange lack of action and/or reaction and to confirm her perception of him, Rounding (Catherine the Great, 2007, etc.) participated in several online personality tests in the guise of Nicholas. Alexandra most likely suffered from Porphyria, and her paranoia, depression and hysteria, as well as the physical symptoms that kept her in bed, separated her not only from her people but also from her own family. Communications, even with her children, were in little notes exchanged almost on a daily basis exhorting them to better themselves and not to upset her. Rounding’s story is built on the letters, especially those between the czar and czarina throughout their marriage. The letters leave no doubt that the two loved each other very much, even to the point of lightly disguised sexual references in their correspondence. The author does not provide an explanation of how Philippe Vachot and his successor, Rasputin, managed to work their way into the family, and the connection of Alix’s dearest friend, Ania Vyrubova, is also indeterminate. The implication is that Ania fancied herself madly in love with the czar, even writing long love letters (destroyed upon receipt) to him. Ania became extremely close to the couple and managed to control them with her constant demands. References to Ania, Philippe and, especially, Rasputin give an indication of how much her “friends” influenced Alix. Rasputin was treated as a godlike seer, influencing even the conduct of World War I battles. The author’s strong background in Russian history and meticulous research establish her as an excellent biographer, although taking the personality tests in the guise of the Czar could be construed as somewhat presumptive.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-38100-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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