Helpful Score: 3
Great book with lots of photos. Makes you wonder who Anna Anderson really is. Kurth did lots of interviews and wrote in a very nertual tone which is hard to do with a book of this type. Leaves you to decied if Anna Anderson is Anastasia or not.
Lysandra M. (confusedbutcute) reviewed Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson on + 42 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
I really couldn't get into this book. Hope whoever gets it next enjoys it!
According to the rather lengthy article on Wikipedia, Peter Kurth is one of the main proponents of Anna Anderson being Anastasia. Since her death in 1984, there have been two DNA tests. One, of Anna Anderson's tissues taken at a hospital before she died, shows her mitochondrial DNA to be inconsistent with being a member of the royal family but consistent with being from a certain Polish peasant family, the Schanzkowskas. The other, of remains near Ekaterinburg in Russia, show that the body found was Anastasia. I guess if you want to continue the controversy you could argue that the tests were flawed somehow, but I'm not sure how you can fake a false positive.
Lyn M. (lyn-antiphon) -
"Did Anastasia, the beautiful young daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, really escape the fate of the imperial family that bloody night of July 16, 1918? ... Now, after more than a decade of research & detective work, Peter Kurth sheds startling new light on one of this century's most elusive puzzles: is Anna Anderson truly Anastasia? Based upon hitherto unavailable documents, scientific evidence & a file only recently discovered at Harvard University...unravels a story more shocking, more sinister, more heartbreaking & cruel than any dramatist would have dared to invent."
