Ferro (Social Sciences/êcole des Hautes êtudes, Paris; The Russian Revolution of February 1917, 1972), an expert on the political details of the Russian Revolution, claims to offer new information in this political biography of Tsar Nicholas II. But since its original appearance in England in 1991, Ferro's volume has been outdone and outdated by Edvard Radzinsky's magisterial The Last Tsar (1992). With long excerpts from letters and diaries, as well as with interviews with survivors and descendants, Radzinsky offered not only the harrowing life of Nicholas as tsar, father, and husband but also the terrible price of being part of Nicholas's family; he also wrote of his own odyssey in recovering the family's stories. Ferro, on the other hand—saying that the Soviet Union withheld necessary information and that the archives are closed—depicts a Nicholas who is variously an ``ordinary man'' and a ``victim of History,'' both brutal and feckless, a conformist and traditionalist—a man dominated by his wife and disdainful of intellectual and Jews. The author offers an inadequate analogy between Nicholas and Louis XVI, another pleasure-loving king confused by contemporary ideas, and baffled by the reformers, and acquiring only belatedly the political acumen that might have saved him. The execution of the tsar's family is buried here in a complicated argument over who was responsible for it: Ferro blames the Bolsheviks but not Lenin himself, who, he claims, negotiated with the Germans to save the tsaretsa and her daughters. And although sightings of Anastasia and other family members are nearly as ubiquitous in scholarship and popular culture as sightings of Elvis or UFOs, Ferro claims that ``no professional historian has thought until now'' to question reports of the family's survival. Overly cerebral and full of vague conviction, blame, judgment, and collective opinion. The human drama—from the execution of Rasputin to the struggle of the tsar's family to understand, escape, and survive—is displaced here by abstract argument. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-508192-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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