An independent historian's highly romanticized tale of the daring, calculating grand duchess who was among the few Romanovs to survive the Russian Revolution. Fans of European royalty and their histories will relish the story of Victoria Melita (18761939), otherwise known by her nickname, Ducky. Granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and the Russian emperor Alexander II, Ducky embodied the end of an era and a way of life for Europe's intermarried royal families. Her first marriage, to Prince Ernest (``Ernie'') Ludwig of Heese and the Rhine, was something of a coup for its promoter, Queen Victoria. But it was a tragedy for Ducky. After several years, the source of the couple's incompatibility—Ernie's homosexuality—became known to Ducky. Acting with admirable pluck and characteristic self-assurance, she divorced him. She went on to establish an extended affair with her first cousin, the Grand Duke Kirill of Russia. Flouting both an ecclesiastical and imperial ban on their union, the cousins married. After the revolution, they escaped to France. There, guided by Ducky's ambition and sense of self-importance, the two presented themselves as claimants to the Romanov throne. After losing her country, her riches, her home, and her family, Ducky also lost true love; the revelation of a certain (but still secret) behavior by Kirill broke her heart and led to her death. Sullivan's emphasis on the culture of European royalty is both this book's major attraction and its greatest weakness. So exaggerated is the author's regard for the royal families that he repeatedly frames the great historical events of the era around their gatherings, marriages, and deaths. The downfall of the Russian Empire, for example, is discussed not in terms of broader political and economic factors, but only in terms of the destructive influence and exaggerated power of Tsar Nicholas's wife, Alexandra. Interest in royalty is not in and of itself a bad thing. But distortion of history for the sake of this interest is.
Pub Date: May 21, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42400-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
