Word: oxenstierna
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People of the Book tells not one but two parallel stories. The first follows the public acts and private thoughts of the two great Protestant leaders of the Thirty Years War, the brilliant commander King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and his equally brilliant chief minister, Axel Oxenstierna. The second story dives into the ebb and flow of destruction across the shattered principalities of Central Europe to follow the fates of a young man, Lars Larsen, and the lovely little sister he is trying to bring up and lead to safety. The two stories join only at one point, where Oxenstierna...
Paste Jewels. Stacton embellishes this attractive plan with his vivid sense of scene and detail. He freights it with learning and lively language. He floods it with his unique virtues-and the book drowns. Gustavus and Oxenstierna are the most real figures, but they are not really seen in action but in a series of stills, like a set of heroic paintings-"The Last Meeting," "Meditation in the Garden," "The King Falls in Battle." Lars and his sister are truly pitiable, but they are surrounded by grotesques, and at the end are dispatched with the terrible coldness of boredom...
...Modern Pentathlon, run off on five successive days, was invented by the romantic Swedes, has invariably been won by one. The Swede who won last week, Count Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, did it without placing first in any of the five events. He was fourth in the riding (on unfamiliar mounts over 500 metres of un familiar terrain), 14th in fencing (with buttoned épees), second in the pistol shoot (at disappearing targets with a 45-calibre revolver), fifth in the swimming, seventh in running 4,000 metres across rough country. Point total...
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