78 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Things we weren't supposed to know, December 29, 2001
This review is from: Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty (Paperback)
I have to admit I wasn't expecting much from an author whose previous works, according to the bio on the back cover, include
Gross: A Compendium of the Unspeakable, Unpalatable, Unjust and Appalling,
Gross Too, and
The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. Compared to
A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors by Michael Farquhar, which covers much of the same ground in a far more tendentious fashion, 'Royal Babylon' is a very good book.
The sell-copy on the book's cover makes 'Royal Babylon' sound like nothing more than recycled gossip and titillating stories about Those Nasty Royals. It's actually a somewhat more systematic history than that, with in-depth profiles of several monarchs and thumbnail sketches of many others. Shaw also charts thoroughly the recurring incidences of mental and physical illness in the massively inbred family trees of European royalty, and tells tales of drunkenness and debauchery that never made it into the official history books.
Unlike Farquhar, Shaw doesn't moralize about monarchy as an institution, or argue that his findings invalidate the very idea of having a hereditary head of state. In fact, he makes the important distinction (on pages 125-127) that in a constitutional monarchy like Britain, having a nut -- to use the clinical term -- on the throne, while still not a good thing, has far fewer negative repercussions than it does in absolute monarchies like Prussia or Imperial Russia.
An eye-opening and disturbing element of Shaw's history is the body-count of people whose lives were taken or destroyed at the whim of a monarch. Throughout the book, people are beaten, starved, frozen, marched to death, or handed back and forth like trading cards. Thousands died in the construction of St Petersburg. Tall men from across the continent were kidnapped to Prussia to form Frederick William I's Potsdam Giant Guards. Other monarchs laughed at, or even enabled, this 'eccentricity.' As another review on this page notes, however, the death toll from monarchs is still far less than that exacted, in the twentieth century alone, by leaders acting in the name of the People. It may be outside the scope of Shaw's history to point that out, but it's still important to keep in mind that monarchies have tended to be far less sanguinary than 'dictatorships of the proletariat' are.
I wish Shaw had included an index. But apart from that failing, this is a decent general survey of the seamy underside European royal history. Fans of the contemporary House of Windsor will want to read the evidence that suggests the domestic tableau of the post-Victorian British monarchy hides some secrets every bit as dark and troubling as those of the Wittlesbachs, Hohenzollerns, or Romanovs.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Promising start - incredibly sloppy, February 25, 2002
This review is from: Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty (Paperback)
I thought that the book had some promise, when it started to describe how the inbreeding of the Royal houses caused a number of genetic health problems. The book quickly degenerated into a history according to rumor. The usual scandals are dredged up with no attempt to separate fact from fiction. The book then started to get sloppy, did anyone edit it? For example, in the section of Catherine the great the author states that she had three children with three different fathers. On the same page he then names the man responsible for her three children. The author also wants to cover as many people as possible so there is little depth on any one figure. It really reads like a long gossip column.
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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Royal Babylon ~ Wild Romp through European History, July 15, 2001
This review is from: Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty (Paperback)
This has to be the best non-fiction light reading this summer. Why slog through hundreds of dusty history books for the "juiciest bits" when Karl Shaw has lined most of them up in this rollicking little 325 page volume ? It does for the fabled royal houses of Europe what the 'Hollywood Babylon' books did for our American celebrities twenty years ago. This is not a book which is likely to please royal apologists - between the excerpts, Shaw lays on mercilessly outspoken criticism of the Royals described, in the best British tradition. Underlying the fun is a very serious message about the corruption of the aristocracies in Europe generally, and the monarchies in particular - the great pretension of good old feudalism & aristocracy was the simple idea that power should be for the best & mightiest. Yet Shaw has lined up a "rogues gallery" of people at the very top of the aristocratic pyramid that have had absolutely no moral, mental, or even physical might or superiority. One has to be rightly horrified that this system held together, no matter what, and that the whole world and everything in it, was laid at the feet of these monstrous characters. This is a delightfully shocking little book. What is more, 98 per cent of it is entirely true, no matter what the apologists try to argue. As one might expect, since this writer is based in England, Shaw's biggest salvos are directed at the reigning Hanovers - and it certainly does raise an eyebrow that if Diana had survived marriage to Charles and QE II, that she would have been the first Englishwoman sitting on the throne since Henry the Eighth's last wife, Katherine Parr. Or, that even though she was the daughter of an Earl, a decendant of the Stuart kings, and had a noble lineage older than the Oueen's, that she was considered a "commoner" by the customs of England's "Royal" house. Celebrate Bastille Day and the Fourth of July the right way, and buy this book. It may be the best advertisement for democracy you will ever read !!
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