A dry, unexciting account punctuated by all-too-fleeting moments of interest.
Slow-moving account of the life and the mythology surrounding French princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte (1778–1851).
In the book’s early chapters, Nagel (Humanities/Marymount Manhattan Coll.; Mistress of the Elgin Marbles: A Biography of Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin, 2004, etc.) is consumed with detailing the fate of Marie-Thérèse’s mother, Marie Antoinette. These sections are occasionally enlivened by intriguing asides about the young Marie-Thérèse, such as the special sign language she developed to communicate with her parents in prison and the impact on her own development of her mother’s bravery in the face of the French Revolution. The princess doesn’t gain her biographer’s full attention until her escape to Vienna following the end of the Reign of Terror. Despite romantic advances from Austria’s Archduke Karl, she married her first cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, “because at the bottom of her heart she hoped that the Bourbon monarchy would return to France.” (It did, in 1815, but the Revolution of 1830 ensured that Marie-Thérèse would never be queen.) Nagel speculates on rumors of d’Angoulême’s homosexuality, examines a trip Marie-Thérèse took to her parents’ burial ground on her return to France and discusses a period when the 42-year-old princess mistakenly believed that she was pregnant. Somewhere in the folds of this perfunctory history lies an intriguing question: Was Marie-Thérèse replaced by a doppelgänger on her release from prison in 1795? Nagel comes to grips with this question only in the book’s afterword. There, she examines DNA testing and picks apart the scant details regarding Sophie Botta, the woman many believed was the “real” Marie-Thérèse. The author reprints correspondence written by both women, finding a marked difference in their handwriting. She signs off with the firm assertion that Botta “was not Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, daughter of Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI of France.”
A dry, unexciting account punctuated by all-too-fleeting moments of interest.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59691-057-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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