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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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