Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty |
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Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty
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by Karl Shaw
Sales Rank: 7345
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Discount: 32 %
List Price: $14.95
$10.17
At Amazon
on 4-16-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 336 pages
Published by: Broadway; New Ed edition May 29, 2001
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0767907558
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0767907552
Book Dimensions:
8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
Weighs: 14.6 ounces
Product Review
From the madness of King George to the equine escapades of Catherine the Great, from the intramural squabbles of Elizabeth and Di to the staggeringly decadent exploits of Charles X: in this gossipy chronicle of regal shenanigans, British journalist Karl Shaw dishes plenty of dirt--and ably demonstrates why royal watching is such a satisfying hobby.
Was there ever a good monarch? To judge by Shaw's account, it's unlikely. Instead, he writes, "Every monarchy in Europe has at some time or another been ruled over by a madman," adding in passing that only Bavaria's King Ludwig had the good grace to turn his madness into a source of tourist revenue for his subjects' descendants. Of the mad and the downright curious there's no shortage in these pages, as Shaw delivers anecdote after anecdote concerning the demented, sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining behavior of the likes of Germany's Frederick the Great, who "drank up to forty cups of coffee a day for several weeks in an experiment to see if it was possible to exist without sleep"; Russia's Catherine I, "a raddled old alcoholic with bloodshot eyes, wild and matted hair and clothes soiled with urine stains [who] once survived an assassination attempt too drunk to realize that anything had happened"; and England's Queen Mary, "the only known royal kleptomaniac," whose aides would surreptitiously gather the knickknacks she'd lifted from her subjects' parlors and return them with muffled apologies.
Royal Babylon is a guilty pleasure of a book, and one that does a fine job of explaining, in Shaw's tongue-in-cheek words, "why most continentals can't get enough of royalty, provided it isn't their own." --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
Anyone who loves scandal, particularly the juicy dish on royalty, will inhale this gossipy account by British writer Shaw (The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists). In a style reminiscent of low-end tabloids, the author presents a litany of negative and sometimes disgusting details about the personal lives of the men and women who ruled Britain, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Austria. Leaving the late 20th century mostly behind (his only mention of Charles and Diana is in the introduction), the author concentrates instead on royal misbehavior back to the 1700s. Entertaining overall, many entries are indisputably not for the faint of heart, such as the truly gross story of Russia's Peter the Great ("`Great' was generally a recognition of power or brute strength, no matter how they lived, how many people they had killed or how repulsive they were"), described by Shaw as a "paranoid sadist." This tsar was an alcoholic who tortured people for fun and once forced an attendant to bite into the flesh of a corpse. This chronicle is replete with royal sexual activities, including those of the Bourbons of France, whom Shaw credits with possessing "extraordinary appetites." Irony is Shaw's strong suit, which lends a great deal of humor to often humorless anecdotes. For example, he notes that Spain's King Philip IV fathered thirty illegitimate children "but being a good Catholic always felt terrible about it" and forced his wife to have sexual relations three times daily. Like Michael Farquhar's A Treasury of Royal Scandals, this irreverent and amusing exposé of royal indiscretions will appeal especially to those who like their History "lite." Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Reader Reviews
I have to admit I wasn't expecting much from an author whose previous works, according to the bio on the back cover, include 'Gross,' 'Gross II,' and 'The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists.' However, I was very pleasantly surprised. Compared to 'A Treasury of Royal Scandals,' by Michael Farquhar, which covers much of the same ground in a far more tendentious fashion, 'Royal Babylon' is a very good book. The sell-copy on the book's cover makes 'Royal Babylon' sound like nothing more than recycled gossip and titillating stories about Those Nasty Royals. It's actually a somewhat more systematic history than that, with in-depth profiles of several monarchs and thumbnail sketches of many others. Shaw also charts thoroughly the recurring incidences of mental and physical illness in the massively inbred family trees of European royalty, and tells tales of drunkenness and debauchery that never made it into the official history books. Unlike Farquhar, Shaw doesn't moralize about monarchy as an institution, or argue that his findings invalidate the very idea of having a hereditary head of state. In fact, he makes the important distinction (on pages 125-127) that in a constitutional monarchy like Britain, having a nut -- to use the clinical term -- on the throne, while still not a good thing, has far fewer negative repercussions than it does in absolute monarchies like Prussia or Imperial Russia. An eye-opening and disturbing element of Shaw's history is the body-count of people whose lives were taken or destroyed at the whim of a monarch. Throughout the book, people are beaten, starved, frozen, marched to death, or handed back and forth like trading cards. Thousands died in the construction of St Petersburg. Tall men from across the continent were kidnapped to Prussia to form Frederick William I's Potsdam Giant Guards. Other monarchs laughed at, or even enabled, this 'eccentricity.' As another review on this page notes, however, the death toll from monarchs is still far less than that exacted, in the twentieth century alone, by leaders acting in the name of the People. It may be outside the scope of Shaw's history to point that out, but it's still important to keep in mind that monarchies have tended to be far less sanguinary than 'dictatorships of the proletariat' are. I wish Shaw had included an index. But apart from that failing, this is a decent general survey of the seamy underside European royal history. Fans of the contemporary House of Windsor will want to read the evidence that suggests the domestic tableau of the post-Victorian British monarchy hides some secrets every bit as dark and troubling as those of the Wittlesbachs, Hohenzollerns, or Romanovs.
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Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty
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Updated on 4-16-2008.
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