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Royal Highness Audiobook
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(3.00) - 146 listener ratings
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Publisher Description
For his Royal Highness Klaus Heinrich, prince of a small German duchy, life means servitude to traditional ducal functions—until he meets the independent-spirited and liberal-minded American Miss Spoelmann. During the course of his unorthodox and quixotically tender wooing, Heinrich is forced to reach into unknown depths of his personality and discover the real meaning of the word "duty."
Peopled with a range of characters from aristocrat to artisan, Royal Highness provides a microcosmic view of Europe before the Great War. Mann's charming fable of a decaying, stratified society rejuvenated by modern forces illustrates what he regarded as a universal truth: that ripeness and death are necessary conditions for rebirth.
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“The great virtue of Royal Highness is its relaxed, fairy- tale quality that naturally brings the reader inside that 'Edwardian' calm which preceded everything common to contemporary social life. It is very easy to make connections between the book and theories of stratification, statemaking, ritual, legitimacy, even the political economy of preindustrialized states.”
— Alan Sica, author of Weber, Irrationality and Social Order
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“Robert Whitfield strikes the right tongue-in-cheek approach from the first line and sustains it with witty impersonations of the characters.”
— AudioFile
Royal Highness Listener Reviews
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" Lightweight Mann, if this is possible. Still enjoyable. "
— Ian, 11/5/2012
About Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus. Thomas Mann died in 1955.
About Simon Vance
Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.