An intimate, richly detailed, and candid portrait of the dramatic life and times of Napoleon’s wife, Empress Josephine. Erickson (Bonnie Prince Charlie, 1989, etc.), with well-received books on the Tudor monarchs and Queen Victoria, has herself become the queen of royals” biographers. But queenship isn—t always foreordained. The aristocratic (yet not high-born) Josephine Tasher de la Pagerie, for example, made her way to the top of Parisian society despite being born to a failed plantation owner in the colony of Martinique. Her biographer shows how this rough and sultry island background well served Josephine, molding her into a durable survivor. For all her power, grace, and charm, the empress emerges, too, as someone to pity. This woman who used men once wrote in a letter, “I will behave like the victim I am.” And while a reader might sympathize with Josephine’s circumstances—e.g., her barrenness and her struggles with her aristocratic heritage amid revolution—Erickson also unveils damning dismissals of the woman by some of those within and outside the Bonaparte clan who considered her “venal, calculating,” and worse. Perhaps Josephine’s flirtation with the swarthy, moody general of the republic was for her but a career move, with adultery an essential social institution that she could not ever give up, not even as an empress. Erickson’s writing, sometimes dominated by details of the era’s fashion and lavish imperial finery, is strongest when depicting the murderous frenzy of revolutionary times. The author’s academic background in history helps to give weight and depth to her portrayal of a tumultuous period. The many notes and works cited attest to Erickson’s exhaustive research. Moreover, her scholarly insights combine superbly with a mastery of period manners more often found in the best historical fiction. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20001-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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