Kindle Reads: Doomed Queens, by Kris Waldherr

Via.

Genre: Biography, Non-Fiction

Rating:  ★ ★ ★ 

Published: 2008

Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Pages: 176

Fun facts about me: I considered being a history major in college before deciding that I actually hated all of the history classes I had taken and was waaaay more interested in examining political mechanisms of historical events. (I'm looking at you, twentieth century anarchists.) But despite that, I love reading history books and learning more about dead people and past events (a quick way to my heart: buy The Rise of the Third Reich for me, plz), so when I saw Doomed Queens mentioned on a blog I really like, I decided to get it for my Kindle before I left for my semester abroad.

In Doomed Queens, Kris Waldherr basically sits you down in a coffee shop (or bar), and over drinks talks to you about powerful women throughout history who met their ends in...less than pleasant ways. Doomed Queens is basically the equivalent of having a late night talk with one of your best friends about "that girl" who was a little too fab or too crazy for this world, and what happened to her ("Like, can you believe she was caught trying to overthrow her husband?"). Also: there are chapter quizzes that ask us, "What have we learned?"

Waldherr tackles more than 400 years of queens (and regicide) in this book, from Athaliah (from Biblical times) to Princess Di. Because of the huge scope of this book, and its relatively short length, it's basically impossible to get a totally comprehensive history of all of the people mentioned in it. While I did appreciate how there were a lot of queens presented and written about in Doomed Queens, I sometimes felt a little frustrated when I felt like their section was super short, or that their section could have gone more in-depth. But, I mean, some queens just weren't going to have a lot of background sources available (I'm looking at you Athaliah). Waldherr crafts a narrative and history within Doomed Queens that tries to make the most out of the (sometimes minimal) resources available to her.

I also had a few annoyances with the Kindle version of this ebook. Mostly, that I felt like the various graphics that were included in the text were either blurred or not formatted well. I pulled up the Kindle app on my computer to try to get a better glimpse of one of the illustrations in the book, but it wasn't much of an improvement. These technological glimpses sometimes annoyed me, but luckily the narrative wasn't really affected by it.

 

Some nifty illustrations (drawn by Waldherr). Via. Via.

While I'm not sure if I would reread Doomed Queens, I did appreciate how Waldherr introduced me to a lot of new historical figures that I can potentially research in the future. I would recommend this book to anyone jonesing for a quick, informative read or anyone who is interested in learning more about past female leaders or past royal families.