Bending over backward to make a sympathetic case for the underachieving offspring, Gelardi (Born to Rule: Five Reigning...
Uniquely conceived, well-argued comparison study of three epochal matriarchs—Queen Isabella of Castile, Empress Maria Theresa and Queen Victoria—and the daughters who didn’t measure up.
Three sad stories make it clear that anxiety of influence made it impossible for the offspring of these great lady monarchs to meet their mothers’ standards. Catherine of Aragon was the youngest daughter of Queen Isabella and Ferdinand, who united Spain and consolidated their power by expelling the Jews and the Arabs, instigating the Inquisition and funding Columbus’s journey to America. Their well-educated daughter was just 15 when she was sent to England to wed Arthur, Prince of Wales, who died so soon after the nuptials that she was promptly married off to his brother. Her marriage to Henry VIII might have endured happily if an heir had survived. Though Henry was determined to marry Anne Boleyn, Catherine proudly refused to agree to an annulment, dying unbending and in banishment as England’s once-strong relations with Spain and Rome lay in tatters. Marie Antoinette was a perennial disappointment to Empress Maria Theresa, resolute defender of Hapsburg territories against Prussian encroachment and a prolific matriarch (she gave birth to 16 babies in 19 years). The empress hoped the alliance of her youngest daughter with the Dauphin of France would bring Austria closer to the Bourbons. In fact, it did the opposite: The pretty teenager, who preferred diversions to intellectual pursuits, was soon detested as l’Autrichienne and later blamed for provoking the French Revolution. Vicky, Queen Victoria’s firstborn and favorite child, was more intelligent and accomplished than her brothers. She made a love match with Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia, and prospects seemed good for a further extension of England’s influence, but she was thwarted by Bismarckian intrigue and resentment of her liberal sympathies. Using royal progeny as pawns on the foreign chessboard turned out to be a dicey proposition in all three cases.
Bending over backward to make a sympathetic case for the underachieving offspring, Gelardi (Born to Rule: Five Reigning Granddaughters of Queen Victoria, 2005) delivers substantial, accessible European history.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37105-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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