An easy-reading, lightweight history lesson. Farquhar’s tales of totalitarianism make one wonder if the secrets behind so...
More tales from the nasty lives of global royalty.
Farquhar (Behind the Palace Doors: Five Centuries of Sex, Adventure, Vice, Treasury, and the Folly from Royal Britain, 2011, etc.) continues his chronicles of members of royal families and their strange, often reprehensible foibles, which demolished governments, lives and countries. This book, covering the horrors of Russia’s 300 years of Romanov rule, concentrates on the totalitarian autocrats and their beastly reigns, during which they rewarded their favorites with thousands of serfs. Even great accomplishments, such as Peter the Great’s navy and Westernization, are swept aside with stories of dictatorial actions such as his banning of beards and his personal torture of prisoners. Likewise, the author portrays Catherine the Great in light of her usurpation and the death of her husband, Peter III, as well as her long list of lovers. The book also tells the stories of the violence against the czars and their supporters, not least the multiple attempts on the life of Alexander II. It took a bomb to finally eliminate the man who actually freed the serfs. The czars who were not congenitally cruel and repressive, like Nicholas I, were certifiably mad or grossly ineffective. Farquhar devotes almost a third of the book to Nicholas and Alexandra, perhaps due to the fact there is so much material from which to choose. Nicholas was weak-willed, introverted and completely under the thumb of his despised wife. Both were under the spell of Rasputin, who claimed to heal their son Alexei’s bouts with hemophilia. Alexandra’s shyness was construed as pride and haughtiness, but she controlled Nicholas and his government to their desperate ends.
An easy-reading, lightweight history lesson. Farquhar’s tales of totalitarianism make one wonder if the secrets behind so many centuries of cruelty could be in the DNA.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7905-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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 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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