Recommended for fans of imperial histories, royal scandals, or tragic romances.
A study of the many mysteries surrounding the death of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary and his mistress.
The conventional story holds that the couple was at Mayerling, Rudolf’s hunting lodge, where he shot her, then sat with her body for hours before shooting himself. A story of love denied and lovers united forever in death? Maybe not. King and Wilson (co-authors: Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age, 2015, etc.) first establish the miserable life of Rudolf. His father, Emperor Franz Joseph, treated him like a military cadet with no power or influence. His mother, Empress Elisabeth, escaped her vicious, controlling mother-in-law by ignoring her only son. The only time his mother stepped up was when she demanded that Rudolf’s governor, appointed by Franz Joseph, be replaced. A cruel, abusive man, he drove his young child to a nervous breakdown. His new governor fed Rudolf’s intelligence, although he may have overdone it, with dozens of different instructors giving lessons. Rudolf was smart and talented, and he was inclined toward modern thought, intellectuals, and the idea of a prosperous middle class. He was also volatile and often threatened suicide, waving his gun around and begging others to commit suicide with him. His many affairs left him with a venereal disease, which he passed to his wife, causing sterility and leaving no hope of a royal heir. His affair with Baroness Mary Vetsera was arranged by her mother, wealthy social climber Helene Baltazzi, and Rudolf’s cousin, Marie Larisch. Helene’s motives for prostituting her daughter were to gain access to the right places and people. Marie’s motives were strictly mercenary. Helene gave her money and clothes while Mary and Rudolf were victims of her blackmail. There are many theories of why and how the two died, even that Rudolf was quite finished with Mary, who may have been pregnant. Rumor upon rumor abounded, and the authors lay out a variety of theories for readers to ponder.
Recommended for fans of imperial histories, royal scandals, or tragic romances.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08302-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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