A biography of a royal beauty of the Victorian age who was married too young to Emperor Franz Josef and became empress of Austria-Hungary. Veteran biographer Sinclair (Corsair: The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1981, etc.) profiles Elisabeth—of noble Bavarian blood and the bearer of four children (including the notorious Rudolf of Mayerling), despite a philandering husband, who, it was believed, infected her with a mysterious malady. As a young wife and mother, she had to contend with a domineering mother-in-law who took control of the royal children. Elisabeth, a fine horsewoman who loved the outdoors, strove for health and beauty. Bored with ceremonial court life and crowds, she broke away from Vienna and family, seeking solitude. Constantly wandering with a large contingent of servants, she lived in various palaces across Europe, where her glamorous style set fashion standards for 30 years. Her devotion to oppressed people like the Hungarians and the Irish, among whom she lived for long periods, added to her popularity—with everyone except their Austrian and British rulers. Franz Josef gave carte blanche to her expensive tastes and wanderlust; in return, she condoned his liaisons. Sinclair capably provides the historical background as time was beginning to run out for the inbred ruling dynasties of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, Romanovs, and others. Feared anarchists and socialist assassins stalked the nobility as the nationalist powers were about to destroy one another in WWI. Elisabeth was knifed to death by an assassin in 1898. A well-written, thoroughly researched story of a popular and beautiful empress, who, while self-indulgent, sought a life of privacy and peace, and showed sympathy and charity toward the poor. She died tragically, overwhelmed by publicity and away from royal life. Sinclair finds contemporary parallels in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19852-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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