A riveting photographic record of the lives of Nicholas and Alexandra that emphasizes their sheltered world and its consequences, both personal and political. Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children led a life of extreme regimentation. Fortunately, their daily routine included ``slow, cozy evenings of reading, sewing and pasting photos into albums.'' Each of the tsar's four daughters had a camera, as did the heir to the throne, Alexei, and they even developed their own film. The resulting trove of 200 diverse photographs ranges from documentation of public events and ceremonies (coronation, funerals, the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, the 1905 revolution) to the extremely intimateincluding a shot of the tsar's nude posterior under water. Adding to the sense of the ``lost world'' invoked in the book's subtitle are the additional 150 contemporary color photographs of royal palaces and other locales that continue to impress despite their sometimes ruined state. Kurth (Anastasia, 1983; American Cassandra, 1990) has geared his accompanying narrative to the more personal aspects of Nicholas and Alexandra, returning to the history of their families and their younger years. He paints a more complex and sympathetic portrait of the oft-ridiculed Alexandra, whom he presents as a solemn German princess lost in a culture of unusual opulence. And in what some will consider an overly generous assessment, Nicholas is portrayed as a misguided but not a malicious ruler, moving ``from blunder to blunder.'' But the strength of Tsar lies in the photographs themselves, which together with the highly readable text vividly restore to us the unique world of the Romanov court and the personalities of the ill-fated royal family. Above all, they remind us of the Romanovs' ``life of splendid isolation,'' removed from all levels of Russian society. A moving and groundbreaking presentation (the companion volume to a National Geographic TV special) that will fascinate readers of every sort. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-50787-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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