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
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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