2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Competent, with caveats, November 18, 2005
This review is from: The Descendants of Louis Xiii (Hardcover)
Why Louis XIII? Because he's the common male ancestor of all the surviving royal lines of the House of Bourbon, and the author's intent is to trace every descent, legitimate and illegitimate from Louis, which works out to about 100,000 names. That includes the once-reigning families of Parma, Romania, Tuscany, Bavaria, Modena, Waldberg, Brazil, and Bohemia, among many others. I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about the details of, say, the living representatives of the cadet branches of the ex-ruling family of the Two Sicilies, to know how accurate the information provided is, but this fat volume certainly gives the appearance of completeness. On the other hand, there are no source citations and no bibliography worth mentioning. From the size of the acknowledgements list, it appears Willis actually wrote question-filled letters to every living descendant he could find - which also means he and the reader are at the mercy of the respondents' memories and agendas. It's all presented in outline form, no accompanying text at all after the brief introduction, and with cross-references for descendants who intermarried (of whom there were many). There's also a section of rather poorly reproduced black-and-white photos of some of the living royals and aristocrats listed herein.
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