It would be criminal for lovers of historical nonfiction to miss this story of theft, sadness, and obsession.
Bahney (Longhairlovers: Healthy Hair Secrets Revealed, 2nd Ed., 2014, etc.) dissects the real-life theft of a spectacular jewel and the life of an Austrian empress.
The hair of Empress Elisabeth of Austria—known as “Sisi” (pronounced “Sissy”)—wasn’t quite as long as Rapunzel’s, but it did nearly reach to the floor and took an entire day to clean. As befitted a coiffure of that length and thickness, Sisi would occasionally adorn it with an accessory mounted with about 30 diamonds of various sizes and one large pearl. The result was a spectacular “glittering halo” effect that made her a sensation. (One element of the piece, the Kochert Diamond Pearl, was housed in Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace museum until it was stolen in 1998.) Famous in her prime as one of the most beautiful women in the world, Sisi and her spectacular hair stars were immortalized in a painting that became popular in Europe. Bahney details her tragic life, telling of her sadness at being in the royal Austrian court, her apparent eating disorders, and her fanatical exercising so that she could maintain her “wasp waist.” The book also covers Gerald Blanchard, the master thief who stole the Kochert Diamond Pearl, and Bahney tells his story as fully as she does Sisi’s. The book provides a fascinating peek at 19th-century thinking, such as the widespread belief that if a pregnant woman looked at animals too long, her baby would likely be born looking like one. Bahney, a journalist, populates the book with engaging supporting characters, such as Sisi’s domineering mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, and her beleaguered husband, Emperor Franz Joseph. Ultimately, however, this is a book about robbery: both of a jewel and of a lonely young woman’s life.
It would be criminal for lovers of historical nonfiction to miss this story of theft, sadness, and obsession.Pub Date: June 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7864-9722-5
Page Count: 212
Publisher: McFarland Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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