5 comments about Fatal Passion:, A: The Story of the Uncrowned Last Empress of Russia.

1. I really don't know where to begin. I read this book a year ago and am reviewing it now only in response to the extraordinarily absurd and unfair customer reviews that I recently read here. I am 36, a Phd in English Lit and teach at a local college. By any reasonable and fair criteria of review, this book is exceptionally well-written. The author Sullivan has a wonderful way of using words and an unusual gift for weaving a narrative that is both dynamic and engaging. His style equally entertains and informs. Although I am not a historian, I can appreciate his extensive and thorough research. Of course the book has flaws - but they are relatively minor ones, and certainly not the awful errors that the incredibly shallow and mean-spirited critics on this page seem so convulsed. How curious to me that this excellent biography has seemed such a lightning rod for these acutely negative people. In an age where criticism is 100% personal and subjective, it is a true study in psychology when these highly prejudiced and obviously bitter people gleefully attack a work such as this with their sharpened stilettos. Imagine someone writing a review and basing an entire negative attack on the opinion that the book's subject is not beautiful in their own estimation. Obviously Victoria Melita is no beauty for today's standards, but Sullivan bases his estimation on numerous quotes which show her as a beauty by the standards of a different world a century ago. Why anyone should have trouble accepting this fact of changing fashion and taste and cruelly dismiss the book because of it - I simply don't understand this mind-set. I think the fact that Sullivan is a young, handsome male who comes off as privileged, if not aristocratic himself, has antagonized many readers (liberals, men-hating feminists, ect) and made them resentful and jealous. There can seemingly be little other excuse for these hostile and unfair critiques. Any open-minded, intelligent reader without some extreme agenda would find this book to be what it is - not the greatest biography ever written, but certainly a fascinating, entertaining and extremely well-written historical work - one which is more than worthy of a long and careful read.



2. This was an immensely enjoyable and fascinating book from beginning to end. The author certainly did a superlative job in gathering and presenting the facts and placing them in a very skillful and compelling narrative. So often history comes across as dull and lifeless, but not here. Sullivan has a rare talent for dramatic construction and detail which ignites the story and makes it fascinating to follow. I really enjoyed his character descriptions and the clever way he created the time and place and unique sensibility of a long-passed era. I find many of the critiques here rather difficult to comprehend. Maybe some readers had been misled or misinformed as to what type of book they would be reading. For some of the more vicious reviews, I can only assume these readers would be more at home in a ultra-hip and downbeat modern subject matter. Certainly Victoria Melita was no beauty by our current standards, but the author fully explains this and only references her in the then estimations and standards of her own era. These rather mean-spirited and extremely carping criticisms aside, I think anyone who wants to read a wonderfully written historical biography will fully appreciate this book and not be disappointed.



3. This is the biggest lot of historical nonsense. Sullivan has an
   irritating style and a gushing attitude towards his subject
   (either he's related to Ducky or madly in love with her). He
   cannot get over how impossibly wonderful, gorgeous, perfect, etc
   he thinks she was. This is a totally inappropriate stance for a
   historian towards a subject. He also trashes everyone Ducky knew
   to make her look better. Sullivan's treatment of the murdered
   Empress Alexandra is particularly cruel and unnecessary. Bottom
   line: Ducky was an overrated, frumpy, greedy historical footnote.
   Cyril wanted to be Emperor, so why didn't he start by executing
   traitors like himself and his wife? Their behavior was inexcusable, even during a revolution. This book is inexcusable
   as a history or as a biography. Don't waste your time or money.



4. I have at least 100 different books about the Romanovs in my personal library, and I have to say that this is the bottom of the barrel. The writing is trite, the research is flawed, and there are so many inaccuracies that I question this book being called non-fiction. There were so many things Sullivan could have developed in greater depth--especially the relationship between Victoria and her sister. Of course, Ducky was such a shallow individual that I imagine it must have been difficult to write a biography about her. Past reviewers seemed to either love or hate this book. I suspect that the raves came from Sullivan's friends. Any historian familiar with Romanov history will identify this book for what it is--a very flawed attempt to make a minor character in Russian/German/English history into a major one.



5. This is not a terrible biography, but I have to agree with the reviewer who said the author is way too enamored of his subject to be objective. He's not the best writer in the world, and he does his subject no service by romanticizing; being melodramatic (that title!), and/or speculating about her life and the people who surround her...It's difficult to write about someone who ordered her personal papers destroyed, which must be why Mr. Sullivan indulges in speculation at times. I preferred John Van der Kiste's "Princess Victoria Melita" as the better biography of this granddaughter of Queen Victoria; it's a far more balanced biography than Mr. Sullivan's.

No comments about Julien Green: A Critical Study.

No comments about Doves of War: Four Women of Spain.

3 comments about With Love from Diana: the Princess of Wales' Personal Astrologer Shares Her First-Hand Account of Diana's Turbulent Years.

1. I feel that Andrew morton protrayed Princess Daina as the Angel that we all knew of that helped those in need. I espesially enjoyed the chapter "My cries for help" talking of her problems with Prince Charles and her marriage. And that of her Bulimia. I would like to take this moment to thank Andrew Morton. For his kind words, and his honesty about Princess Diana. Sincerley, Catherine M. Catron



2. Author Penny Thornton describes 2 dreams she had in 1986 or '87, in which Diana is seen with "a white car moving ahead, leaving the black car behind." Consider that this book was published two years BEFORE Diana's accident, and this is nothing short of phenomenal!! Several other parellels occur in these 2 dreams, as well. This is a book worth reading for those who can't get enough of Diana.



3. I'm not saying that people don't have spiritual gifts, but I do question much of Penny Thornton's vision. I must agree with the previous "critic", however, regarding the dream about the car: it shocked me so, that I read it over and over and got tears in my eyes; (if this part is pure fiction, I would have a terrific bone to pick with Ms. Thornton about lies and playing with another's emotions!).The book is a good enough read, but nothing spectacular.

5 comments about The Burning of Bridget Cleary.

1. England had a policy for the people of Ireland, their first colony: keep 'em as poor, illiterate and ignorant as possible: that'll keep 'em docile. That's as may be, but every people needs a world view. So the people of Ireland grafted onto their hard-held Catholicism another, more ancient, supernatural belief system, involving fairies and their ways. Nor were these the charming, cuddlesome fairies of "Finian's Rainbow,"either. "The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story," by Angela Bourke, an expert on Irish oral tradition, provides the best exposition I have ever read of these belief systems.
   
   Among the peasantry, there were many who believed fairies to be not just mischievous, but actually malign."Fairies," says Bourke,"are normally invisible, but they are there. They live in the air, under the earth, and in water, and they may be just a little smaller than humans, or so tiny that a grazing cow blows hundreds of them away with every breath....Fairies are not human, but they resemble humans and live lives parallel to theirs, with some significant differences: they keep cows, and sell them at fairs; they enjoy whiskey and music; they like gold, milk, and tobacco, but hate iron, fire, salt, and the Christian religion.... "Almost any death,"she adds,"other than a gentle and gradual departure in old age, is open to interpretation as the work of fairies."
   
   Fairies kidnapped people, and left behind "changelings." When an infant failed to thrive, or a person suddenly became inexplicably ill, and failed to get better with the usual prescriptions, those were changeling situations.
   
   Some remnants of these beliefs linger today:we call a sudden paralysis caused by cerebral hemorrhage a stroke, from the Irish words for this phenomenon, "poc si," "fairy stroke." And a quack doctor: that's a shaman steeped in treatments for illnesses caused by fairies.
   
   Unfortunately, the uusual prescription to cure these fairy situations was fire. Bourke quotes from a book on Irish folklore written by William Wilde, Oscar's father. "'About a year ago a man in the county of Kerry roasted his child to death, under the impression that it was a fairy. He was not brought to trial, as the Crown prosecutor mercifully looked on him as insane.'"
   
   Bourke continues,"several other accounts can be found in nineteenth-century newspapers and police reports of suspected child-changelings in Ireland being placed on red-hot shovels, drowned, or otherwise mistreated or killed. Only eleven years before Bridget Cleary's death, the Daily Telegraph of May 19,1884 reported a case less than 15 miles away...."
   
   "Ellen Cushion and Anastatia Rourke were arrested at Clonmel on Saturday charged with cruelly illtreating a child three years old, named Philip Dillon. The prisoners were taken before the mayor, when evidence was given showing that the neighbours fancied that the boy, who had not the use of his limbs, was a changeling left by the fairies in exchange for their original child. When the mother was absent the prisoners entered her house and placed the lad naked on a hot shovel under the impression that this would break the charm."
   
   In March, 1895, 26-year old Bridget Cleary fell ill, then disappeared from her cottage in rural Tipperary. At first, those who knew her best insisted she had just gone away for a time, but her body was soon discovered in a shallow grave. She had been burned to death by her husband, a cooper/ farm laborer, and several others. The case was a sensation in England and Ireland, and proved very helpful to the Conservative party in the parliamentary debate over Irish home rule:it confirmed lingering popular fears about the savage Irish peasantry.
   
   Bridget had been resented by her husband and neighbors for quite some time. She was pretty, clever, assertive, flirtatious, and, worst of all, a modern sort of woman. She was a dressmaker/milliner who owned her own sewing machine: consequently she was more skilled and better off than most of the people around her. She was certainly better dressed than many, and was the only woman around to own-- and wear-- gold earrings. Furthermore she kept poultry, and Irish husbands of the time just hated it when their wives did that. The chickens were rough on the cottages' thatched roofs. And, by long tradition, any money an Irishwoman made in the care of poultry was her own, not to be shared with her husband.
   
   When Bridget was first taken ill, her husband did try hard to get the help of a real, trained doctor, but doctors weren't interested in peasant women. Therefore, her husband went to the fairy doctors, who prescribed the treatment that was to have such tragic results. Bridget's husband and nearly a dozen others stood trial for this crime, were found guilty, and sentenced to jail terms. Not so the quacks.
   
   Unfortunately, this is a difficult story to tell, a narrative involving nearly a dozen people, and Bourke is not as well-equipped to tell it as she is to explain the world in which this could have happened. In addition, most of the conspirators/defendants have, you should pardon the expression, really commonplace Irish names. Put this book down on Monday, pick it up again on Wedsnesday, you'll have a real hard time remembering all those Kennedys. But if you are interested in Irish history, or women's history, you may find it worth the effort.



2. This should have been a compelling story. Instead the reader has to piece the details of the crime together as the author goes off on endless tangents. These tangents are supposed to illustrate historical and folklorical Ireland. The crime surely could have been a very fascinating read if it weren't for the abundance of nonsense that overhwelms it. Some of the history and folklore is certainly relevant but there is much too much. I found myself skipping through stories of Oscar Wilde (?!) just to get to the next portion of the murder tale. This book is unclear and verbose at the same time. A decent true crime writer could very easily have made this incredible story into a readable account..even while including history.



3. THE BURNING OF BRIDGET CLEARY catches the eye immediately with its eerie (hardcover) illustration of a ghostly woman floating in midair superimposed over a man's stern, shadowy face. Lovers of all things Irish will find this horrifying true story of the life and death of Bridget Cleary of County Tipperary particularly disturbing, set as it is in the bucolic Irish countryside of the late 19th Century.
   
   Visitors to Ireland will be aware of what author Angela Bourke calls "townlands." An inexact term, it describes rural places that are not on any map. Certainly not towns, nor even villages or hamlets, these places consist of a few adjacent farmsteads and perhaps a freestanding house or two, set off from other such places by fields, and perhaps by a large boulder carved with the name of the place. Populated by only a few families, who living cheek-by-jowl for hundreds of years are interlinked but independent, such places exist "there but not there," a reality which has informed the Irish mind and character for generations.
   
   Ms. Bourke, a lecturer in Irish history, uses the death of Bridget Cleary as a paradigm for cultural change and disruption. Bridget Cleary died in 1895 because the "modern" Social Darwinist linearly organized, scientific, English-speaking and aggressively concrete universe of the late Victorian era butted heads with the "traditional" non-linear, symbological Gaelic-speaking world it was supplanting.
   
   At first glance, Bridget and Michael Cleary would seem to have been thoroughly "modern." Both Michael and Bridget were educated and literate. She was a trained dressmaker who owned her own Singer machine. He was a tradesman, a cooper, who worked in a large commercial brewery. For their time and place they were affluent. They lived in the newest and most modern house in Ballyvadlea, a place in the south riding of County Tipperary.
   
   There were a few disquieting elements in their lives. They were childless after six years of marriage, the focus of much stigma in staunchly Catholic Ireland at the time. They were close friends with William Simpson, the despised local "Emergencyman" or landlord's agent, a Protestant. Ballyvadlea, though only a few miles from the modernized town of Fethard, still had a percentage of primarily Irish-speaking inhabitants amongst its small population.
   
   Bridget was contemporaneously described as "very pretty" (the local collective memory nowadays describes her as "sexy"), and stylish (she made her own fashionable clothes and wore gold earrings). She was also described as "stubborn" and "headstrong," probably a difficult and somewhat vain young woman. These traits could not have endeared her to the people of Ballyvadlea, mostly her rustic relatives, among whom she had grown up. There were also backbiting whispers that the attractive, engaging Bridget might have been having an affair with the handsome, dandified William Simpson, a rumor which, even if untrue, would have caused outrage in their spouses, both of whom were older.
   
   In March 1895, Bridget caught a cold which soon developed into a serious respiratory infection. The odds are that today's modern medicine would have stopped the illness in it's tracks. Antibiotics not having been discovered, the Clearys were forced to rely on an assortment of patent medicines, and sought the aid of the local Health Service Doctor, a notorious drunk, who did not come when called.
   
   In the interim, the untreated Bridget became more and more "demanding" and "excitable." This is understandable, considering that any minor illness could become a life-threatening condition very easily in that time and place. Bridget was no doubt frightened at the possibility that she might die. Unfortunately, Michael Cleary's father passed away suddenly at this point, adding to the overall level of tension in the house.
   
   The five days the doctor stayed away allowed Bridget's illness to run rampant. Finally arriving, he prescribed some medication and went on his way. When Bridget did not improve, Michael revisited the doctor, a confrontation which ended in a shouting match. Disgusted, Michael chose to visit the local "quack doctor" (traditional herbalists were so called because of their association with farmyards). When the quack visited Bridget, whom he knew well, he reacted to her appearance and behavior by saying, "That's not Bridgie!" a comment which soon convinced the locals that the woman in the sickbed was not Michael Cleary's wife but a fairy changeling.
   
   Bridget Cleary's "treatment" then degenerated into a kind of exorcism, which involved forcing her to ingest various foul decoctions of herbs, dousing her with unspeakable liquids, subjecting her to ongoing verbal and physical abuse, the drawing and twisting of her body, and the infliction of pain by various methods in order to drive away the changeling. In the end, her husband immolated her.
   
   The contemporary press leaped on the lurid tale of "The Tipperary Witch Burning" with as much interest as the story would excite today on any media network. Bridget's death made headlines throughout the world. Ms. Bourke argues convincingly that the horrified reaction of the Great British public to the "primitive" mentality demonstrated by Michael Cleary (and by extension in the British mind, all the Irish) was a major element in defeating the Ireland Home Rule bill then before Parliament.
   
   Bourke is also convincing in demonstrating that the burning of Bridget Cleary had more than just political ramifications. It was a pyrrhic victory of the timeless and magical world of ancient Irish traditions over the regimented modern world of the emerging twentienth century. It was specifically a patriarchial act: The men of that traditional world acted to punish a young woman who had stepped beyond the invisible but very real bounds that constrained females in their culture. It is telling that the people of Ballyvadlea let the British authorities themselves bury Bridget, a lifelong neighbor and relation.
   
   Now remembered mostly in a Tipperary children's rhyme, THE BURNING OF BRIDGET CLEARY is a fascinating look at a world in the midst of transition.



4. You would hardly believe that this is not a novel. The story is gripping and the author's telling of it is masterful. Bourke not only relates the facts of the case, she evokes the spirit of the age. What is more, she skillfully portrays how folk beliefs and superstitions are intimately intertwined with power and the status quo. In a quasi-religious kind of way, the folk beliefs of the community in the novel form the basis of control. In our 21st century world, driven by empirical evidence, the rule of rational law is paramount. In the absence of such laws, folk beliefs functioned to shape society and were used to legitimise the punishment of those who stepped outside the bounds of the status quo. This book is truly fascinating and a must-read for anyone interested in human belief systems and the way they shape society. On top of what we can learn from it, it is also just a truly wonderful story, horrific, poignant and altogether human.



5. Just in time for Halloween, I finished reading The Burning of Bridget Cleary. The book is a very good narrative and analysis of the mysterious death of 26-year-old Bridget Cleary on March 15, 1895 in Ballyvadlea, Ireland. Apparently Bridget was believed by her family to have been taken away by "the fairies" and a sickly changeling left in her place. In the course of trying to determine if the Bridget in his house was really his wife, her husband Michael exploded into a rage and Bridget either caught fire or was intentionally ignited. Author Angela Bourke expertly places us in the politics and culture of the time, helping us to understand what might have caused seemingly rational people to behave in a way that is nearly inexplainable. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in history, folklore, true crime, the supernatural, or sociology.

No comments about The Irish Corsicans: Sequel to Loyalty.

No comments about Nell Gwynne: A Passionate Life.

No comments about Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade (Liverpool English Texts and Studies).

No comments about I Am of Ireland: An American's Journey of Discovery in a Troubled Land.

3 comments about Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: Woman of the Century.

1. The photographs in this book are wonderful. A complete history of the life of the Queen Mother told through the pictures that appeared in The Daily Telegraph, this is a great buy.



2. Many of the photographs in this book are not new. They have been seen before in other publications. Athough there are some good new selections of photos used. In all cases however, the photographic reproductions in this book are excellent. A very nice, personal gift copy that I would be pleased to give to a friend.



3. This is a lavish guide to the practically indistructable mother of the British Sovereign. She was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons to her fellow debs in 1919, she was Queen as George VI's wife, but to all of us she is just the Queen Mum, bless her; the plucky lady with the common touch, who shrugged off gunshot wounds after a quarrel about gambling debts in an East End boozer, the massive-armed matriarchal powerhouse who has no time for nonces or liberty-takers. A marvelous book.