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
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
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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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