Customer Reviews

Maria Theresa

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If you buy this book, you will find all you need to know about Maria Theresa. Rather than tell the story of the book, I will tell you that the author tells an interesting story that will captivate you. You will be suprised by how she maintained - despite her advisors and family. The author is a little hard on Joesph II. You will come out of this book respecting this woman, but "with eyes wide open", knowing her faults. I originally bought this book to find out what was behind the "useless people" remark she used about the Mozarts. I now know why she said that. Buy this book and discover for yourself. Well worth the money! 338 pages and the book may appear a little old; however, the content is spell-binding!

I bought this book to see what was behind the "useless people" remark she made about Mozart and his family. After reading this book, I feel that I know why she made this remark. You will have to read and draw your own conclusion! This book revealed the reasons for some hard decisions made by this remarkable woman and the unbelievable incompetence that surrounded her. After reading this book, you may - or may not like Maria Theresa. I won't go into how I feel, because you may come away completely different. Even though this book is a little old, it is captivating, informative, easy to understand, and you will walk away understanding the history of this woman completely. This is the book to buy if you want to know about Maria Theresa. 338 spell-binding pages. Sorry I don't tell the story of the book in a short review.

She was dumure, yet autocratic. She was merry yet at times prudish. She was compassionate, yet could also be ruthless. She could rule by fiat but prefered ruling by charm. She was like a beautiful princess. Oh wait, she WAS a beautiful princess. For she was Maria Theresa von Hapsburg, in her time the most powerful woman in the world.

And if all this sounds off the wall for someone who has been dead for two-hundred years, to a history buff no one is truly dead. And in any case her subjects thought much the same of her at the time.

Edward Crankshaw here gives his splendid biography of one of the great monarchs of history. Maria came to the throne ill-prepared, to rule over a patchwork quilt of nations that was a holdover from Medieval times. With her charisma and wisdom she managed to bring it into modern times, but with a gentle proding, rather then the arogance of the sweeping change determined to have progress no matter who is hurt. Her realm perhaps had more ancient injustices then Prussia did. But she also had the wisdom to know that people are people, not toys to play with and that change can sometimes be worse then what is replaced. Of course she might not have put it that way. She ruled by instinct not philosophy. And if her realm was less efficient(as it is called)then others, it was also more human. But she had one more great achievement. For of all who have held near absolute power Maria was one of the few who was never quite corrupted. She was not only a woman of charm and a woman of power. She was a woman of character.

Mr. Crankshaw writes this splendid biography. In it he shows, not only Maria's suprising ability to hold her own in political intrigue with the power-hungry rulers around. It also shows her at home with her daily life. It shows her at work and at play. It shows how she wrestled with the eternal problem of reconciling piety and power and with the more humdrum problems of how to control oneself-a greater achivement then controling an empire. It is a warm sympathetic biography, but it does not leave out her warts such as her vindictiveness, her occasional weakness, and sometimes her curious lack of sophistication(a weakness which was sometimes as much a strength as a weakness). This is a book about a great person who was also a good person and it is well worth the read.

Above all this book is beautifully written and organized. We are led from the beginning of her career as Emperor to her death. The author has thought long and hard about the research he has done and given us intelligent, sensible descriptions of her decisions and the context in which they were made. He knows when and how to dramatize a scene and the writing flows like a beautiful river. All that in just 388 pages!!!! I highly recommend this book!

I am so confused - I finished this "biography" completely unsatisfied. Around page 150, I started to wonder when Crankshaw was going to actually start writing about Maria Theresa. This book is not a biography - it would more accurately be described as "The Times of Maria Theresa" because he spends more space on the wars, nobility, architecture, musicians and Joseph II than on Maria Theresa herself. I got the feeling that if it weren't for Joseph II and Marie Antoinette, he'd have written even less about Maria Theresa simply because there would have been no one to contrast her to (apparently with the exception of her eldest daughter and the son who took over the throne after she died, none of her other children were worth mentioning by name). Only two complete chapters (23 pages) are devoted to this woman; after this, it is not until the very last section of the book that what Maria Theresa accomplished during her reign comes to light (although there are plenty of hints).

Out of 19 pictures/illustrations included, only three are of Maria Theresa and there is one partial family portrait. The only births that are specifically mentioned are Joseph II's and Marie Antoinette's. He eventually gets around to mentioning that out of 16 children, 12 survived - but only after his lengthy tangents on events and people before Maria Theresa was born and up to 200 years after she died. In fact, her children aren't even mentioned with any type of consistency until page 249 - which seems really odd considering how much time she spent pregnant. Considering that she spent the majority of her life trying to make sure her children were raised properly, one would think that more pages would have been devoted to such matters.

This is the most disappointing biography I have ever read - and I've read quite a few. Had I known I'd be learning more about Austria before, during and after Maria Theresa's reign rather than about the woman behind the events, I would not have wasted my time reading this book. I have no clue how the other reviewers walked away from this "biography" happy with what they had learned about Maria Theresa - I feel that a lot was left out (although I don't know what because it wasn't included!). You get more biographical information in Marie Antoinette: The Journey and Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution than in this monstrosity (there are probably other books, I just haven't read them yet).