Royal Highness

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

“Robert Whitfield strikes the right tongue-in-cheek approach from the first line and sustains it with witty impersonations of the characters.”

AudioFile

“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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