From Publishers Weekly
Reading Bondeson-who is drawn to sensational, even penny-dreadful material that he examines in a sober and scientific tone-is always a guilty pleasure. In his latest, Bondeson (Buried Alive; etc.) addresses historical enigmas, imposters and eccentrics in half a dozen case histories of lost heirs, secret marriages, immortal kings and mysterious simpletons. There is Kaspar Hauser, who turned up in Nuremberg in 1828 with neither identification nor, apparently, memories of his origins; his partisans still insist he was a kidnapped prince of Baden. There is the legend that grew around a certain Russian hermit, suggesting he was actually Czar Alexander I, who purportedly had faked his own death in 1825 in order to retire into religious contemplation. Bondeson relates these stories with a straight if skeptical face, often allowing them to collapse under their own convoluted contradictions. The Victorian-era courtroom antics alone are worth the price of admission when a beefy Australian butcher sues to be recognized as the meager missing heir to the baronetcy of Titchborne. Modern DNA tests have corroborated the theory that George III did not secretly beget several children with a Quaker wife named Hannah Lightfoot and that the son of Louis XVI did die in prison during the French Revolution, though literally hundreds of pretenders have turned up. Bondeson, a physician and professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine, has only cursory conclusions about why these cases (along with new variants such as Elvis and Princess Di sightings) fascinate us, but there's no question that, in Bondeson's lively retellings, they do. 20 b&w illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Medical professor Bondeson, author of Buried Alive(2001), among others, has written an engrossing series of essays on various historical mysteries. Some--such as the true identity of Kaspar Hauser, the abandoned boy who turned up in Germany after years in a cell and was thought by many to be the missing crown prince of Baden--are generally well known. Others--such as Tichbourne Claimant, the dissolute son of one of England's richest families who went missing in a shipwreck--are known only to a few. But Bondeson invests them all with the same import and exhaustive analyses, which can leave the reader swimming in details. The author's medical background obviously comes into play here, as he often attempts to finalize the solution by DNA testing. Those looking for definitive answers to individual cases, though, will be disappointed. After all, these cases are long-standing mysteries because of their problematic natures, and, in the end, all Bondeson can do is lay out all sides, which he does thoroughly and compellingly. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
The Great Pretenders: The True Stories behind Famous Historical Mysteries FROM THE PUBLISHER
Did the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette die during his imprisonment in the Temple Tower, or was he one of the people claiming to be the Lost Dauphin after the Terror ended? What does DNA testing on the heart purported to belong to the Dauphin reveal? Was Kaspar Hauser, the mysterious boy who claimed to have spent his entire childhood in a subterranean dungeon, really the Crown Prince of Baden, or was he suffering from pseudologia fantastica, a pathological desire to deceive other people? And when an eccentric and reclusive duke built a complete set of tunnels and rooms beneath his country estate, who is to say that he also didn't have a second life as a shopkeeper with a separate family in London? In this work covering the most famous unsolved cases of disputed identity, Jan Bondeson uncovers all the evidence, then applies his medical knowledge and logical thinking to ascertain the true stories behind these fascinating histories.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New Yorker
In nineteenth-century Russia, many people believed that a certain Siberian hermit was really the late Tsar Alexander I. After the French Revolution, several men gained followings by claiming to be the surviving son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Bondeson, a British rheumatologist with an engaging sideline in the more sensational byways of history, sifts evidence with a keen understanding of the difficulty of establishing truth: “Kings and queens are mere mortals, but it is difficult to kill off a good story.” DNA testing has felled a few hypotheses, but mysteries persist, in part, Bondeson believes, because they are bound up with larger questions of national identity. He also writes about the not-so-great pretenders: the long-lost relatives who show up just in time to contest the family fortune. These trials provided high drama in Victorian England, reaching a peak of silliness when one witness testified that Charles Dickens, between books, acted as a pimp for the eccentric Duke of Portland.
Publishers Weekly
Reading Bondeson-who is drawn to sensational, even penny-dreadful material that he examines in a sober and scientific tone-is always a guilty pleasure. In his latest, Bondeson (Buried Alive; etc.) addresses historical enigmas, imposters and eccentrics in half a dozen case histories of lost heirs, secret marriages, immortal kings and mysterious simpletons. There is Kaspar Hauser, who turned up in Nuremberg in 1828 with neither identification nor, apparently, memories of his origins; his partisans still insist he was a kidnapped prince of Baden. There is the legend that grew around a certain Russian hermit, suggesting he was actually Czar Alexander I, who purportedly had faked his own death in 1825 in order to retire into religious contemplation. Bondeson relates these stories with a straight if skeptical face, often allowing them to collapse under their own convoluted contradictions. The Victorian-era courtroom antics alone are worth the price of admission when a beefy Australian butcher sues to be recognized as the meager missing heir to the baronetcy of Titchborne. Modern DNA tests have corroborated the theory that George III did not secretly beget several children with a Quaker wife named Hannah Lightfoot and that the son of Louis XVI did die in prison during the French Revolution, though literally hundreds of pretenders have turned up. Bondeson, a physician and professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine, has only cursory conclusions about why these cases (along with new variants such as Elvis and Princess Di sightings) fascinate us, but there's no question that, in Bondeson's lively retellings, they do. 20 b&w illus. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Continuing his series of historical investigations (Buried Alive, 2001, etc.), Bondeson reconsiders perennial tales of substituted infants, royal pretenders, wild children, and claimants to lapsed inheritances. Many prior tracts, plays, and romances have covered the strange doings of these schemers and scoundrels, not to mention the beliefs of their credulous victims, and this author feels no need to search for the un-obvious. Was a taciturn Russian ascetic really the tsar who presided over the defeat of Bonaparte? What of the lost dauphin, child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, who turned up in the darndest places? (Though Bondeson neglects Twain's Mississippi, he overlooks little else in the grand story of the little child in the Temple dungeon.) Was the famous Kaspar Hauser actually a lost prince, simply a belching vagabond, or something else? (The author has a credible notion.) Speaking of royalty, as a work like this must, some believe that the British throne itself may rightfully belong to a black South African. The expansive, notorious Tichborne claimant, Bondeson reminds us, had a malformation that would qualify him to play M. Butterfly better than the lost Wodehousian ninny he purported to be. A truly eccentric English nobleman was reputed to have secretly commuted, mainly underground, to life as a London tradesman. To solve that case, retired Detective Chief Inspector Littlechild of the Yard was summoned, with as much success as Lestrade would have had without Holmes. To his cogent critical analyses of these familiar cases, the author adds mention of the inevitable Anastasia pretenders, Lindbergh babies, and a surviving Princess Di, each essential to a cadre of never-say-diebelievers. Bondeson (Wales College of Medicine) examines hitherto neglected documents and adds his valuable medical knowledge to the combined myths and histories, noting the contributions and limitations of DNA testing. Entertaining studies of classic imposters and a public inclined to be gullible even before the age of TV. (20 illustrations)
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