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
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
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