A sad tale of possible interest to royalty and history buffs.
The life of yet another star-crossed, crazy European royal, capably told by the blueblood author of Living with Ghosts (1996).
Charlotte, beloved daughter of King Leopold I of Belgium, was considered a fine catch in the early 19th century. She was pretty, cultured, fabulously rich, and, as her Austrian suitor Archduke Maximilian put it, “very intelligent, which is a little tiresome, but I’m sure I’ll get over it.” Though his future father-in-law thought Maximilian a tyrannical braggart incapable of passing a mirror without checking himself in it—and, worse, interested only in Charlotte’s purse—the two married in 1857 and went off to rule the Italian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia, ceded to Austria at the Congress of Vienna. It was, writes Prince Michael of Greece, “a poisoned gift”; the locals weren’t happy about being governed by foreigners, no matter how enlightened, and once Italy was reunified in 1859 they sent Maximilian and Charlotte packing. When Napoleon III of France sent them to Mexico to rule on his behalf, the Mexicans responded much like the Italians, putting Maximilian up against an adobe wall and executing him in 1867. Charlotte was not there to witness this indignity, having quietly gone mad and been shuttled off to Europe a few years earlier. Unhinged and paranoid, she lived until 1927 while her fortune mysteriously disappeared. The author writes of all this with sympathy and a certain world-weariness, sniffing that Maximilian might have enjoyed a different fate had the US given him, and not the tattered Mexican rebels, its support. He also suggests under his breath that Charlotte’s insanity may have resulted from the consumption (“unbeknownst to her, of course”) of aphrodisiac drugs, which Maximilian apparently consumed endlessly in an effort to become the father of his country.
A sad tale of possible interest to royalty and history buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-836-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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