PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe book is elegantly written, in a brisk style that plays to Ms. Goldstone’s strengths in portraiture and the theatrical set-piece. The author deftly interweaves the ups and downs of Maria Theresa’s running contest with Frederick with the vicissitudes of her life as Europe’s most prolific procreator ... Ms. Goldstone gives us a lively account of the empress’s favorite daughter, Maria Christina, whose passion for the seductively charming Isabella of Parma takes some of the starch out of the Habsburg facade ... Four life stories in one cover is a heavy lift for even the most talented biographer. Ms. Goldstone could have done a better job tying the proliferating plotlines back to the book’s implied central theme—the galvanizing figure of Maria Theresa. The author’s evocative prose occasionally borders on camp...And the maps are a mess, giving the Habsburg Monarchy a name (\'Austria-Hungary\') that wouldn’t exist for another century and boundaries that it had lost before the date on the map. But these shortcomings are offset by Ms. Goldstone’s rich storytelling and the humane and balanced portraits she provides of her subjects.
Martyn Rady
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Rady adds to a growing body of research challenging the conventional view of Habsburg rulers as \'gaolers of nations\' who suppressed the vitality of the cultures they governed ... Mr. Rady’s book can be seen as a kind of family portrait of the Habsburgs as rulers, schemers, dreamers and procreators. It’s a big task...Most historians have chosen to highlight some sliver of their story, but this volume takes it all in. That Mr. Rady can, in under 350 pages, cover everything from the division of the family’s lands in the Swiss Argau in 990 to the surrender of power in 1918 by Charles, the last Habsburg monarch, without sacrificing essential details or losing the reader’s attention, is a feat of both scholarship and storytelling ... There are shortcuts: Mr. Rady flies through the 20-year struggle with Napoleon and gives Franz Joseph’s wars with Italy and Prussia just a few sentences apiece. But what Mr. Rady neglects in statecraft he more than makes up for in colorful pen portraits of Habsburg rulers and the artistic, scientific and cultural accomplishments of their reigns ... Still, by the book’s end, readers are left wondering how exactly the Habsburgs pulled it all off.
