Engaging examination of a false identity.
A scrupulously mined account of the woman who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.
Extensive research and interviews conducted by Welch (The Romanovs and Mr. Gibbes: The Story of the Englishman Who Taught the Children of Last Tsar, 2005, etc.) give historical heft to this fascinating story of a delusional factory worker who spent 60 years posing as royalty. On the evening of July 17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children, including 17-year-old Anastasia, were led into the basement of the Bolsheviks’ “House of Special Purpose” and shot. The soldiers were drunk, jewels sewn into the victims’ bodices caused bullets to ricochet, the scene was chaotic; nonetheless, according to eyewitness testimony, there were no imperial survivors. In the 1920s, a woman who went by the names Anna Anderson and Anna Tschaikovsky stepped forward, alleging to be Anastasia Nikolaievna. She offered no evidence and a spotty tale of escape, refusing to describe the night of her supposed assassination because it was too traumatic to discuss. Anderson was, in fact, unable even to speak Russian. Nonetheless, strangers and childhood friends received her with mixed reactions ranging from denial to conviction that she was the long-lost duchess. The most fascinating aspect of the book centers around her followers, the self-described “Anastasians,” and the lengths to which they extended themselves on her behalf. Of particular note is Gleb Botkin, son of the tsar’s physician, who was acquainted with Anastasia when they were children and subsequently devoted much of his life to advocating Anderson’s claim by writing fictionalized tomes inspired by her story. Ten years after Anderson’s death in 1984, DNA testing conclusively proved that she was not Anastasia, but Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish peasant. Clues throughout the book ensure that Anderson’s unveiling doesn’t come as a surprise. The real question here is not her true identity, but what motivated her lies in the first place, a mystery about which Welch can only speculate.
Engaging examination of a false identity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06577-0
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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