A biography that captures Elizabeth’s endearing personality but dwells on her too speculatively. Fans of royal biographies will welcome Mager’s dramatic tale of the tragic life of Elizabeth (a.k.a. Ella), granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Hessian princess, elder sister of Empress Alexandra of Russia, and in her own right a Russian grand duchess. He considers the wide-reaching web of royal connections throughout Europe at the turn of the century. Mager begins his tale with the story of Elizabeth’s mother, Alice, whose religious spirit, strength of character, and commitment to others, he argues, Elizabeth inherited. We see how, surrounded by death, war, and personal loss since childhood (her mother and several siblings perished), Elizabeth grew into the woman who remained devoted to her husband despite a hollow marriage and, after his assassination, dedicated her life to Russian Orthodoxy; she became a nun. Finally arrested by the Bolsheviks, Elizabeth was thrown into a mineshaft to a gruesome death and later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. To add to the drama, Mager pays close attention to relations between Elizabeth and the Russian empress, dramatically presenting the former’s role as a go-between in Alexandra and Nicholas II’s courtship; less successfully, Elizabeth tried to distance her sister from the devious faith-healer and political meddler Rasputin. Mager gets into trouble, though, when the biography veers too far into the “what if” school. Annoyingly, he argues that had Elizabeth married her cousin Willy, the future kaiser of Germany, WWI might have been averted, and that if she had not urged on the marriage of Alexandra and Nicholas (Mager claims she wanted a relative with her in Russia), the Russian Revolution might not have occurred. Interesting story, but the amateur historian’s interpretations too often don’t match the evidence. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0509-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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