Download Free Mayerling The Facts Behind The Legend Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Mayerling The Facts Behind The Legend and write the review.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
On a snowy January morning in 1889, a worried servant hacked open a locked door at the remote hunting lodge deep in the Vienna Woods. Inside, he found two bodies sprawled on an ornate bed, blood oozing from their mouths. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary appeared to have shot his seventeen-year-old mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera as she slept, sat with the corpse for hours and, when dawn broke, turned the pistol on himself. A century has transformed this bloody scene into romantic tragedy: star-crossed lovers who preferred death together than to be parted by a cold, unfeeling Viennese Court. But Mayerling is also the story of family secrets: incestuous relationships and mental instability; blackmail, venereal disease, and political treason; and a disillusioned, morphine-addicted Crown Prince and a naïve schoolgirl caught up in a dangerous and deadly waltz inside a decaying empire. What happened in that locked room remains one of history’s most evocative mysteries: What led Rudolf and mistress to this desperate act? Was it really a suicide pact? Or did something far more disturbing take place at that remote hunting lodge and result in murder? Drawing interviews with members of the Habsburg family and archival sources in Vienna, Greg King and Penny Wilson reconstruct this historical mystery, laying out evidence and information long ignored that conclusively refutes the romantic myth and the conspiracy stories.
In 1848, 28-year-old Francis Joseph became King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria. He would reign for almost 68 years, the longest of any modern European monarch. Focusing on the life of Emperor Francis Joseph and his family, this book examines their personal relationships against the turbulent background of the 19th century.
How did these famous people REALLY die? * Princess Diana * Napoleon Bonaparte * Glenn Miller * Lawrence of Arabia * General George Patton * President Warren Harding * The popular gossip columnist who planned to "blow the lid off" the JFK assassination * nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood * TV's Superman * Marilyn Monroe * presidential advisor Vince Foster * The European prince whose romantic "suicide" has been immortalized in books, plays and movies * The woman in Ted Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick * John F. Kennedy, Jr. WHAT THIS BOOK SAYS ABOUT THE DEATH OF THESE AND MANY OTHER FAMOUS PEOPLE WILL SURPRISE YOU!
On January 30, 1889, during the Viennese Carnival, Emperor Franz Josef’s son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then at himself at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods. In this National Book Award finalist, Frederic Morton tells the story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of ten months, “the Western dream started to go wrong.” In 1888-89 Vienna, other young men like Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and Arthur Schnitzler were as frustrated as the Crown Prince, but for other reasons. Morton interweaves their fates with that of the Prince and the entire city, until Rudolf’s body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf is born to Frau Klara Hitler. “Riveting” — John Leonard, The New York Times “As lush, beguiling, and charming as an emperor’s waltz” — Publishers Weekly “[A] spirited tale of Viennese life... by his skillful use of rich but forgotten daily details [Morton] construct[s] a fascinating account of ten months in the lives of Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo Wolf, and others.” — Kirkus Reviews “On every page, great names and odd moments glitter... a remarkable and unusual slice of history.” — Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times “1888/1889 is my favorite year in the life of ‘the Imperial City,’ and Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor is my favorite book about Vienna.” — John Irving, author of The World According to Garp
"A well-written, thoroughly researched story of a popular and beautiful empress, who, while self-indulgent, sought a life of privacy and peace, and showed sympathy and charity toward the poor." - Kirkus Reviews In 1898 Luigi Lucheni fatally stabbed Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, on Lake Geneva as she prepared to board a steamer from the Mont Blanc pier. Her life had been one of both profound sadness and inspiring perseverance; and in its course she set the style for the royal rebels who would follow her, particularly the late Diana, Princess of Wales. While still a child, Elisabeth was married to the Hapsburg prince Franz Josef, heir to the Austrian Empire. She gave him three children; one of whom, Crown Prince Rudolf, would later commit suicide at Mayerling. Finding the atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian court stifling, the increasingly erratic empress traveled incessantly. Abandoning her husband to the attentions of the Viennese comic actress Katharina Schratt, Elisabeth went on errands of mercy to the docks and slums of London and Liverpool, Barcelona and Naples, Smyrna and Marseilles. She was the despair of local police, who could not protect her, even though she wore disguises. She supported independence movements in Ireland, where she hunted superbly alongside her close companion, the English cavalryman "Bay" Middleton; and also in Hungary, an integral part of her husband's deteriorating empire. When Lucheni assassinated the empress, he killed the most alluring royal figure of the Victorian age. But fame was her real executioner. Her celebrity had led to her death. Elisabeth had been driven into loneliness until she had lost all sense of reality, pursuing a desperate liberty that a confined marriage would never allow her.
While battles and wars and ‘the clash of civilizations’ are as old as time itself, there is little doubt that the conflagration of 1914–1918 was something unique and terrifyingly new. There was not a corner of the globe that did not feel its effects, some more than others, but the scope of its impact on economies, populations, food supplies, the character of governments in general and the day-to-day lives of numberless ordinary people, were such as the world had never experienced, nor expected. Little did anyone dream that the assassination of relatively minor figures of the Habsburg royal family, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, carried out by an unknown Serbian teenager on the street corner of an obscure town called Sarajevo that few had ever heard of, could possibly provide a spark that would plunge the entire European continent into an industrialized war of catastrophic destruction. But it did: the two shots that youth fired were surely ‘heard around the world’, and several million people would perish or be maimed as a result. The story of World War I has been told by many different writers, historians and participants in many different ways, especially so before and during the centennial of its events that just concluded. All the World at War stands apart from many of these standard studies. It presents a familiar story from points of view that many readers might find surprising: unexpected details, different perspectives, atypical and generally insightful observations from contemporaries (often obscure to modern readers), who witnessed the events and personalities that pushed the war along from phase to phase. The narrative is chronologically arranged, beautifully written, with something new or intriguing on every page. This is a unique and finely paced account of ‘The War to End all Wars’ that didn’t.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE BOSTON GLOBE This richly entertaining biography chronicles the eventful life of Queen Victoria’s firstborn son, the quintessential black sheep of Buckingham Palace, who matured into as wise and effective a monarch as Britain has ever seen. Granted unprecedented access to the royal archives, noted scholar Jane Ridley draws on numerous primary sources to paint a vivid portrait of the man and the age to which he gave his name. Born Prince Albert Edward, and known to familiars as “Bertie,” the future King Edward VII had a well-earned reputation for debauchery. A notorious gambler, glutton, and womanizer, he preferred the company of wastrels and courtesans to the dreary life of the Victorian court. His own mother considered him a lazy halfwit, temperamentally unfit to succeed her. When he ascended to the throne in 1901, at age fifty-nine, expectations were low. Yet by the time he died nine years later, he had proven himself a deft diplomat, hardworking head of state, and the architect of Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy. Jane Ridley’s colorful biography rescues the man once derided as “Edward the Caresser” from the clutches of his historical detractors. Excerpts from letters and diaries shed new light on Bertie’s long power struggle with Queen Victoria, illuminating one of the most emotionally fraught mother-son relationships in history. Considerable attention is paid to King Edward’s campaign of personal diplomacy abroad and his valiant efforts to reform the political system at home. Separating truth from legend, Ridley also explores Bertie’s relationships with the women in his life. Their ranks comprised his wife, the stunning Danish princess Alexandra, along with some of the great beauties of the era: the actress Lillie Langtry, longtime “royal mistress” Alice Keppel (the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles), and Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston. Edward VII waited nearly six decades for his chance to rule, then did so with considerable panache and aplomb. A magnificent life of an unexpectedly impressive king, The Heir Apparent documents the remarkable transformation of a man—and a monarchy—at the dawn of a new century. Praise for The Heir Apparent “If [The Heir Apparent] isn’t the definitive life story of this fascinating figure of British history, then nothing ever will be.”—The Christian Science Monitor “The Heir Apparent is smart, it’s fascinating, it’s sometimes funny, it’s well-documented and it reads like a novel, with Bertie so vivid he nearly leaps from the page, cigars and all.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “I closed The Heir Apparent with admiration and a kind of wry exhilaration.”—The Wall Street Journal “Ridley is a serious scholar and historian, who keeps Bertie’s flaws and virtues in a fine balance.”—The Boston Globe “Brilliantly entertaining . . . a landmark royal biography.”—The Sunday Telegraph “Superb.”—The New York Times Book Review
One of Britain's most famous and longest serving rulers, Queen Victoria saw widespread change across her empire. During her sixty-three-year reign, in which she became one of the most powerful and influential people in the world, Victoria met everyone from Florence Nightingale to 'Buffalo Bill', as well as royalty from around the world with whom she exchanged truly unique gifts. After meeting the exalted monarch her subjects often recorded their impressions of her, sometimes favourable and sometimes not, and she wasn't shy with her opinion either. The records range from her less than enamoured assessment of 'Greatest Showman' P.T. Barnum and her opinions about Jack the Ripper, to how much she enjoyed Jane Eyre and the affection she held for her family. An Audience with Queen Victoria examines the meetings and letters exchanged between the Queen and a veritable 'who's who' of her time. Through brand-new archival research, newspapers and interviews with descendants, sit right alongside Victoria and, for the first time, experience queenship from her perspective.