Dive Into Sex With The Queen: 900 Years Of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, And Passionate Politics Fashioned By Eleanor Herman Formatted As Brochure

go wrong with sex and history, . . เลมนคงถอวาเปน nonfiction สำหรบเราขอเรยกวา sidestory ของประวตศาสตร
ในฐานะคนทชอบอาน historical romance เรองนไดมาเสรมแตงหลายจดทเรายงไมรและนกไมคอยถง และ หนงสอ historical romance ทเราเคยอาน กไมคอยมเจาชาย เจาหญงมากนก
เรยกไดวา ไดเปดโลกทศนมากทเดยว, . .
แมวา เรองราวของเจาหญง ควน ในยคกอนๆ ในหนาตนๆกลางๆ จะทำใหเราแปลกใจเปนการปพนมากอนแลว ไมสามารถชวยอะไรเราไดเลยในกรณเจาหญงองคสดทาย เจาหญงไดอานา
ในฐานะคนทเกดไมทน เคยแตอานการตนชดบคคลสำคญของโลก เจาหญงในใจเรา เปนเจาหญงแสนดทนาสงสาร เจอแบบน ทำใจไมทนจรงๆ เงบมาก ถงขนาดไปเปดขาวเปดอะไรดเลย เฮอ

เอาเปนวา เรองน ถาชอบประวตศาสตร อานดไมเสยหายคะ เตมเตมจตใจทกระหายอยากจะรด แตกเงบพอประมาณ สำหรบคนทไมคอยรอะไรแบบเรา If you are into gossip and supermarket tabloids why not learn something while getting your fix Brimming with historic royal scandal and intrigue, it's hard to put down.
From a feminist point of view it's also nice to know that even back in the day not all women took it lying down! In royal courts bristling with testosteroneswashbuckling generals, polished courtiers, and virile cardinalshow did repressed regal ladies find happiness

Anne Boleyn flirted with courtiers Catherine Howard slept with one.
Henry VIII had both of them beheaded,

Catherine the Great had her idiot husband murdered and ruled the Russian empire with a long list of sexy young favorites,

Marie Antoinette fell in love with the handsome Swedish count Axel Fersen, who tried valiantly to rescue her from the guillotine,

Princess Diana gave up her palace bodyguard to enjoy countless love affairs, which tragically led to her early death,

In this impeccably researched, scandalously readable followup to her New York Times bestseller

Sex with Kings, Eleanor Herman reveals the truth about what has historically gone on behind the closed door of the queen's boudoir.
This book was a quick and enjoyable read, I don't know whether the change in formatting was a help or a hindrance, setting each chapter across time periods and then covering a number of women in varying degrees some going on for pages, others only a few paragraphs which seemed a bit choppy, but worked in the chronological sense, so you weren't going backward and forward between them.
I enjoyed reading about the women I already knew and learning more about those I didn't, Sophia Dorothea of Celle was particularly fascinating, I think that the limits of information somewhat restricted this book in a way that it obviously wouldn't for sitelinkSex with Kings:Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge.
Still, I love anything to do with royalty, so for a quick read, it was immensely engrossing,stars. Silly, salacious and about as meaningful as People Magazine, this book is compulsively readable, It's wellwritten, engaging and pruriently interesting, It appeals to all of the same trash receptors in one's brain that fuel the National Enquirer, Star and the other weekly mags featuring vapid celebrities, The big difference is that the vapid celebrities in the book are royal and dead, A fun read nonetheless.
This book was fascinating, It was a very thorough look at monarchies all over the world in a very long time span and it was incredibly well researched, Although there were parts that were pure speculation it really gave an interesting account of what the lives of these women were like, Being essentially sold off to another country sight unseen and where half the time they didn't even speak the language, the political slavery they lived in was incredible, It defintiely dispels any fantasy I may have had in childhood about wanting to be a princess! Disney it's not, I hemmed and hawed over Eleanor Herman's "Sex with Kings", mainly because I really couldn't say much about historical accuracy without doing a ton of research, Or so I thought. Simply googling one of the queens featured in "Sex with the Queen" proved my suspicions of Herman's shoddy research and factbending correct, Then I looked at her bibliography, a detail I forgot in my last review, and, . . well.

The two here are, again, for Herman's nice prose and good selection, I definitely want to write down the names of the some of the more obscure women featured and research them further, Because I sure as hell don't trust Herman's word,

I already knew that Herman works around facts to get the juiciest story possible, She certainly did that in "Sex with Kings", making the much maligned Athenais de Montespan look far worse than she actually was, So I wasn't too surprised when I saw Anne Boleyn featured here, though Herman at least had the decency to mention that the queen was innocent, She did go on to give a portrayal of some vicious coldhearted flirt who was mean to the man who "moved heaven and earth for her", Um, are we talking about the same Henry VIII here He also kind of wanted any woman who could give him a son, Anne was simply smart enough and lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, with all the right moves, He probably would have dumped Catherine of Aragon for a foreign princess if Anne hadn't shown up, but oh, Eleanor Herman doesn't miss a chance to dump on not so cute and cuddly women.


I'm not even going to touch what she did with Princess Diana, Again.

I raised an eyebrow at Herman's portrayal of Anne's social circle as a group of gay men, including her brother, She basically vomited up everything Retha Warnicke has said about Anne Boleyn, Warnicke has, of course, been criticized by nearly every Tudor scholar worth his or her salt and in particular Anne's definitive biographer, the later Eric Ives, who was, of course, barely cited here.
Anne Boleyn's brother was in fact quite a womanizer, but WHATEVER HERMAN,

She also chose to somehow state that Marie Antoinette and Count Axel von Fersen had a physical affair though there's nothing to support that I mean, it could have happenedbut the only thing we know of is an emotionally intimate attachment between the pair.
And Marie was hardly repulsed by her husband, as they were good friends, Also, Herman makes this great leap of assuming some random documents were love letters between Marie and Fersen and, . . it's all so slipshod. The son Fersen apparently sired on Marie was actually noted to resemble the Bourbons, and I think Fraser promptly discounted any possibility of Fersen being the father due to dates not lining up.
Amusingly enough, Flora Fraser, Antonia's daughter, is noted in Herman's bibliography, Antonia, THE Marie Antoinette biographer, is not,

Then Herman goes on to completely massacre the marriage of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov, which was actually one of the happiest in royal history, I actually kind of laughed to read about Alexandra dominating Nicholas, when in fact they had a very Victorian marriagehusband in charge, wife in a supporting role, The idea that she had an affair with Rasputin has no basis beyond rumor and is actively offensive to her memory,

The above mentioned issues were my main problems, But then she got all these small details wrong: mentioning that Eleanor of Aquitaine who Herman touts as her ancestress had one daughter by her first husband when in fact she had two, for instance.
I mean, it doesn't take much to correct mistakes like that,

No effort beyond looking for interesting women, No effort, a lot of judgment, and a TON of misogyny, Whatever, Eleanor Herman. Whatever. "Sex with the Queen" by Eleanor Herman reminded me a lot of "Notorious Royal Marriages" by Leslie Carroll, a book I read last year and also loved, It's all about various queens throughout history and their adulterous affairs, going indepth as to backgrounds and explanations of why a royal woman might feel compelled to take a lover.


This Sex with the Queen's style is sort of "gossipy", but I didn't mind that, It's not a total "Seventeen Magazine" gossip column that gushes and seems entirely made up of unfounded rumors, It's just not an overlyserious scholarly work, It seemed very wellwritten to me and I appreciated that the author took the reader entertainment factor and balanced it rather well with the "this is still a book about history and should have sources cited and be based in fact and have the people learn something".
I enjoyed learning more about Sophia Dorothea of Celle and other royal women that I haven't heard much about thus far from this book,

The one thing that knocked it down a star for me was that it seemed like Eleanor Herman let her personal biases about certain personages show through a bit more than maybe they should have.
It's true that she has to explain the story and the scandal within aorso page limit per queen, but I got the distinct feeling that she doesn't have a very favorable impression of Marie Antoinette, Alexandra Romanov, or Princess Diana.
Their entries were more vitriolic than some of the others, I am aware that historians are humans too, and I've read biographies specifically about Marie Antoinette and Alexandra Romanov that perhaps leaned more toward giving these controversial figures the benefit of the doubt in many cases.
But as I read their entries here, at certain points I was kind of like, ", . . Wow, I'm sure this person wasn't THAT bad, . . " I wished Herman had just given the facts about the stories, as this history is super entertaining as it is, and let the readers decide for themselves whether they are going to sympathize with these various queens or not, without being led by Herman's opinions.


Overall though, I enjoyed this immensely, I am reading Herman's "Sex with Kings" as well and hope I like it just as much, I'd also definitely recommend Leslie Carroll's book I mentioned above as well as "Scandals of Classic Hollywood" by Anne Helen Petersen, if you're into this genre of "pretty reliable history that also attempts to really showboat".
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