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.)
