Queen The Books

I'm a huge fan of Royal memorabilia and I thought I'd seen or read every book. However, when I began looking for something more on Queen Alexandra I came across this book. I was excited when I realized that I'd come across such a gem in the rough!

This book is essentially a scrapbook (very oversized) of photos, menus, signatures, etc from all the Royal families of that time. Lady Louisa traveled extensively with Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra and of course, Queen Mary. I found some very rarely seen photos of Prince Phillip's mother.

This is not a biographical book with lots of words and a small section for photos. In fact, if you're not familiar with Royalty or royal history, you might want to get another text to start (biographies on Queen Mary, Queen Alexandra, Queen Victoria and their contemporaries).

Since this book includes travels by the royals you see memorabilia she collected from foreign courts, and without some context those materials may not be easily understood.

I was delighted with the rare chance to see some of these older photographs and the memorabilia Lady Louise collected in her travels! I'd suggest any serious Royal collector obtain this for the library.

This book is almost startling to read and browse through. Lousia Antrim was a Lady in Waiting to Queens Victoria and Alexandra of England and accompnied them on most of the state events and overseas trips they went on.

This book is just packed with inside royal information and ancedotes. It also has an amazing collection of royal photos and odds and ends. Things like signed photos of various royalties, meunu's from various occasions, personal snapshots, postcards etc that Louise retained from her various royal jaunts.

This is a lovely, and in some ways very personal book. You get to see the floatsom and jestom of royal living (eg menus etc) that mostly don't appear in other books. It gives you a great feel for the period and lifestyle Lousia lived.

If you are intersted in the royal heyday of the 19th century and early 20th century this is highly reccomended.

Louisiana Breakdown is an impressively written and thoroughly entertaining novel by Lucius Shepard that blends superstition and lore with faith, potions, and machinations. When a new figure arrives in a small Louisiana because his BMW breaks down, he becomes caught up in the town's tradition of appointing a ten-year-old Midsummer Queen every twenty years. A dark fantasy, Louisiana Breakdown is commended as an imaginative and thought-provoking tale of the fantastic.

Two centuries ago, the townspeople of Grail, Louisiana made a deal with the entity they call the Good Gray Man. The Good Gray Man promised good fortune to the town as long as it provided him with a Midsummer Queen he found acceptable. Accordingly, every twenty years, the town elects a 10-year-old girl to be their Midsummer Queen, the person who draws all of the town's bad luck to her for the next two decades until the next queen is selected, and the Good Gray Man comes to take her away forever.

As this year's Midsummer's Night Eve approaches, the town prepares to choose a new Queen. The reigning Queen, the exquisite Vida Dumars, knows her time is short, that the Good Gray Man will soon come for her. Although Vida has faithfully served as the town's Queen, she's not ready to go-thus, she prays for a champion to appear.

Enter one Jack Mustaine, who blows into town after his BMW breaks down outside of Grail. Vida casts her spells on Jack, and he falls for her like a ton of bricks. But is Jack the champion she seeks? That's a question nobody can answer until Jack comes face to face with the Good Gray Man.

Filled with tension and lurking menace, peopled by fascinating characters, LOUISIANA BREAKDOWN provides further evidence that Lucius Shepard is one of the most original and talented writers working in the field of dark fantasy today. In its first six pages, Shepard creates a living, breathing microcosm, a realistic stage free from cliché. He peoples this world with characters so vivid they threaten to step off the page. He then proceeds to tell a story about good, evil, love, superstition, and destiny, using the traditional elements of dark fantasy to explore his characters' psyches. Told with exquisite compassion, Shepard's novella provided one of 2003's more satisfying reading experiences. Illustrated by J. K. Potter, it's also one of the nicest packages Golden Gryphon has ever offered.

What a riot! There's no need to repeat the book description above since it captures the wildness of the book very well. This book will take you places you haven't been before with characters you've never known. It's a unique read.

My advice - 1. buy the book; 2. turn off the cell phone and TV; 3. go to the bathroom; 4. find a comfortable location to sit and read with a beverage of choice; 4. read & enjoy.

It's set in Peru and Bolivia and maybe Brazil, and is full of erudite literary references and wonderful descriptions of old Lima. At first I thought it was real magic realism but then I thought it was a satire of the genre. The heroine is a sort of sexy female Candide. I was just rereading it and checked Amazon.com for more Cecile Pineda but find everything out of print. The only other review is of a novel called Frieze set in the ancient Orient.

Given the popularity of Shrek, this book deserves a wider audience. The author pokes fun at traditional fairy tales while advocating true virtues in a way kids will appreciate. Almost every line is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Great fun for adults to read to kids! A big hit in my daughter's second grade class. Buy a copy-your child will want to read this more than once!

This is the second book in Margaret Gray's delightful fairy tale series about the Kingdom of Couscous. Like the first book in the series (The Ugly Pincess and The Wise Fool), the storytelling here is fresh and funny, there are all sorts of silly and playful plot twists and turns, and, along the way, Gray manages to teach a valuable lesson without every being preachy. One of the great things about Gray's books is that they appeal strongly to younger readers and older readers alike. I can't wait for the next book in the series.

This is my first project and I am hoping it would be well recieved.
thanks to everyone who has brought my book, my 2nd book is now out, Entitled
Poetry From My Heart, look for it!!!!!

This is my sister's book but I want everyone who is a poet and who likes poems to go out and read this inspirational poetry book. There are poems for everyone so take a chance and go and buy this book.

Irene Mahoney was a nun and a professor of English who taught in New York and her biography on The Life of Catherine de Medici, published in 1976, must still stand as one of the very best.

Mahoney captures the personality of Madame Catherine with a psychological incisiveness, combined with a detailed and in depth understanding of the troubled religious situation of sixteenth-century France.

Held captive as a child within the walls of a Republican Florence under siege by Papal troops, she was handed over to her Medici uncle Pope Clement VII after Florence's capitulation, taking with her the scars of a city under siege that never left her . . .

"The fairest city in the world had become a grotesque, a place of jagged wounds. . . . Hunger, lean and pale, had crept into corners where guns would never have found their way. . . . It was hard to tell the living from the dead . . . except that one had ceased to suffer."

After her betrothal to the ruling House of Valois in France, it was the effects of this early and terrifying experience, Mahoney claims, that shaped Catherine into a "persistent mediator" for peace.

"She saw war plain, without decoration, without idealism. War, she found, was not the tapestries or frescoes that decorated the palace of the Medici; war was an etching whose acid bit into those profound places of her being where nothing else had found its way."

Mahoney's appraisal is not all positive however . . .

"Her efforts to play the friend to opposing forces could only end in failure . . . she clung to a course of action that ultimately spelled her doom."

After the St. Bartholomew massacre in Paris, where Huguenots attended the wedding of Prince Henri of Navarre with that of Catherine's daughter-a wedding that was meant to bring about a political union between Protestants and Catholics but resulted in Protestants being slain in the streets-Catherine's credibility remained severely damaged.

The "Blood-Red" wedding that had been sealed with a "bloody kiss," brought the question of "lawful-revolt" against what was perceived to be a tyrannical Valois regime, into open discussion among the Huguenots.

On top of the religious and political issues, this is also an up close and personal account of the demise of the Valois dynasty. The children of Catherine de Medici helped bring ruin and ridicule to France through their own ineptitude, poor health and irresponsibility that stood in sharp contrast to the robust ability of their mother; one could hardly call them tragic, certainly the comic is emphasised with the protracted negotiations for marriage between Catherine's youngest son, Francois duc d' Alencon, and Elizabeth I of England, giving us an entertaining side long glance of Gloriana.

Mahoney also claims a causal link between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (one time daughter-in-law to Catherine de Medici, who supposedly offered the crown of England and Scotland to Philip II of Spain) and preparations for the Spanish armada.

This complex period in French history is seen through glass clearly from the pages of Mahoney's biography. Her character appraisals are life like and psychologically penetrating as is her understanding of political and religious events. Through it all, a contemporary feel is added by the quotations from many diplomatic despatches.

It's a great pity she didn't write more history as this and her previous biography; Royal Cousin: The Life of Henri IV of France, are both outstanding!

Catherine de Medici is the most vilified Queen in French history - ranking only with Marie Antoinette (another foreign bride) for controversy. Yet, as Mahoney painstakingly shows, Catherine refuses to seek our sympathy. Time after time, she fought her own corner, and up to the bitter end, physically exhausted, she strove in defense of her family interests. She saw out five kings (Francis I, her father in law, Henry II, her husband, and her three children, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III) and was mother in law of Mary Queen of Scots. She sprang from Florence but immersed herself in the fabric of the French state, bearing nine children for the House of Valois. She is associated with some of the worst excesses of the Catholic side in the French Wars of Religion, including the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, yet it is more accurate to see her as a mediator between the truly zealous Guise faction and the equally stubborn Hugenots. Mahoney's biography is both literate and fair, and ranks with the best of Antonia Fraser.

amazing novel full of betrayal,murder and romance.you will become absorbed in this story to the last page.

A superb novel, one of my favourite book I have ever read. Jean Plaidy is able to convert history into an interesting book which people can get absorbed in without a problem. Its an easy book to read with treachery, murder and romance. It has a wide range of vocabulary and I have learnt many new words from reading this book. I recommmend this book for anyone over 14 years old.

I finished this book a few days ago, and liked it so much that my husband thought he'd read the first few pages. He found he couldn't put it down, staying up until 3.00 in the morning reading it!

Written by the producer of the movie "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," it's an insider's look at the challenges and amusing absurdity of trying to get a film made about an off-beat subject (drag queens) set in a remote part of the world (the Australian outback) long before anyone suspected it would be a worldwide smash hit. From Cannes to Broken Hill, the book gives a taste of what life in the movie business is like.

Very fun and entertaining - a great read!

This is a wonderful book about the Queen of Scotland! I was in Edinburgh, Scotland a couple months ago, and saw this book. It contains wonderful pictures and is well-written! Great book for anyone interested in the Mary Queen of Scots!

What an excellent addition to a library dedicated to Mary of Scotland. This book covered her life in a beautiful way, what with portraits (done during her life and modern), pictures of the places she lived, and members of her court. Although every detail of Mary's life just couldn't be incorporated into this book, there was enough to help a person see the time that she lived in and, perhaps, what motivated her to do some of the things she did. For a thorough understanding of her days, please enjoy the grand bio of her by Antonia Fraser. For a quick synopsis of her life, this coffee-table style edition is just wonderful.

Mary Queen of Scots by Carol SCcaefer was a great find. This wonderful book tells an epic tale. The intimate style of storytelling kept me turning the pages. Carol Schaefer's skillful weaving of fact and fiction allowed me to harbor a secret wish that all would go well for the remarkable and doomed heroine. The dusty historical facts I had so often read in shcool came to life with the use of such lyrical language, language fit for a queen. I recommend this book as a perfect gift for friends and family. A discerning reader will appreciate this book by a gifted writer. I await Carol Schaefer's next contribution to the literary world.

My eyes grew big as I read. Carol Schaefer's eloquent language, combined with an "at the edge of your seat" story-line, gave me chills. I never knew reading a biography could be this entralling.