“Kings & Queens: A Chronicle of History’s Most Interesting Monarchies”, by Brenda Ralph Lewis

 

Amber Books, ISBN-13: 978-1782744788

Our minds, like our bodies, must be nourished with healthy fare if they are to flourish and grow throughout lives – but c’mon, it can’t be healthy stuff all the time, right? Sometimes you just gotta scarf down some junk food, for mind and body alike – which brings me to Kings & Queens: A Chronicle of History’s Most Interesting Monarchies by Brenda Ralph Lewis, which is brain candy of the first order. As histories – or biographies – go, its okay; the book – $3 cheap at Barnes & Noble! – is packed with flashy photos and gorgeous reproductions of art, all interspersed with lurid tales of royal debauchery.

For anyone wanting to mentally bring down our Royal Betters this book will do the trick, as these blue-blooded ne’er-do-wells are shown to be all-too-human and a pack of over-sexed sluts, men included in that description (incidentally, Kings & Queens was published before as Dark History of the Kings and Queens of Europe and Dark History of the Kings and Queens of England, so check your shelves before getting this)

But it’s good that I paid a mere $3, ‘cause I wouldn’t use this work as any sort of source material for a book or paper, as it is filled with trashy gossip and rumor presented as lurid fact, which is unnecessary as the lives of these monarchs are more than enough to entertain the average person. And as for the writing quality…well, how about some examples:

“Physically, the infant Carlos was a monster, a hunchback with his right leg shorter than his left. He was mentally retarded and unable to speak until he was five years of age”.

“Babington went into hiding in St. John’s Wood, in north London. But Washington’s agents soon found him. Babington was taken to the Tower of London. The young man was scared witless”.

“Whatever the reason, Christina’s [of Sweden] sex remained ambiguous throughout her life and later led to claims that she was a hermaphrodite, part male/part female, a bisexual or a full-blown lesbian [this after the author devotes a great deal of time to regaling us with tales of her male lovers]”.

And many others, besides. But anyway, for $3 (cheap!) I liked reading about all of these useless gadabouts with too much money and free time roaming Europe and screwing everything on two legs. It knocked them down to Earth from off their gilded pedestals. But mostly I liked all of the pictures and paintings and stuff. So there’s that.