Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric |
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Veronica Buckley
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Pages: 512 (Paperback)
ISBN: 1841157368
Pub: HarperPerennial
Pub date: 2005-06-06
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 206733
Reader Reviews:
Extraordinary (45/46 people found this helpful)
is perhaps the word most suited for the book and its subject.
Queen Christina is perhaps - next to her hero father Gustav Adolf - the best known Swedish monarch. Her reign - as a child queen and as a short lived effective ruler - covers partly the time when Swedish power in Europe was at its height. The very daughter of the protestant hero king abdicating and turning into a Roman Catholic is itself a remarkable story. Her personality and her life style after the abdication were the talk of European courts and often provactive to scandalous.
This story has however been told many times. So ist is quite extraodinary that the author manage to shed new light into the personality of the Queen mainly by comparing reality with the very own view the Queen held about events and especially about her very own person. This is a remarkable achievement and very very interesting indeed to read about. So step by step a description of the Queen emerges properly not a flattering, but always an interesing one. She was a person who could not put into a box; one cannot describe her by using stereotypes. She was very special, but that includes not being very easy or in her case not even very likeable. Her very own perspective of her talents, abilities and political judgement did not correspond with the realities. I was wandering whether Sweden was indeed much better off without her as monarch...
Judge for yourself and and above all enjoy this book. It is written in a wonderful style. I would love to give more than just 5 stars as it is really difficult to write a interesting biography with a new persepctive about a personality about whom so many biographies have already been written. The author succeeded brilliantly!
a flawless biography of a flawed royal (14/14 people found this helpful)
Reared as a boy by her charismatic, kingly father, and the subject of scandalous gossip regarding her bed-sharing with a female companion, Queen Christina cast aside her crown in favour of the easy life. Buckley's book is packed with action and humour, skilfully side-stepping much of the tortured politics that makes so many other books about Swedish history so difficult to take. But while nothing can fault Buckley's multilingual research, her honesty can backfire: Christina comes across as sad, lonely, and ultimately a trifle stupid. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her grasping attempts to hang onto power, even as she capriciously rejects responsibility. The flighty way she summons the philosopher Descartes, only to indirectly cause his death is another example of her regal self-absorption. But Buckley is not afraid to tell Christina's story warts and all, and that alone is enough to gain her five well-deserved stars.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Biography -> Historical -> Countries & Regions -> Europe
Books -> Subjects -> Biography -> Historical -> 1501-1700
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Renaissance, Reformation, Thirty Years War 1501-1750
Books -> Subjects -> History -> General