Timely, but disappointingly superficial.
A breathless account of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798.
Napoleon was attempting to get a head start in Europe’s frantic imperial scramble to carve up the rest of the world, writes Burleigh (The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian, 2003, etc.). But he tried to lend France’s military bid a certain moral authority by bringing with him scientists and artists to help administer the new empire. They were there not just to conquer, but to civilize. Napoleon’s scholars unearthed hugely important antiquities, most famously the Rosetta Stone. Engineers created maps and explored Egyptian waterways. Doctors tried to keep French soldiers healthy and wrote condescending reports about Egyptian “folk medicine.” Magazine writer Burleigh intriguingly comments on the cultural impact that the “discovery” of Egypt had on French decorative arts and fashion, for example the creation in 1804 of a porcelain dinner service decorated with pyramids and Sphinxes. She doffs her hat at “Orientalism,” but her discussion of the colonial fantasies that animated it is shallow and her analysis overly simplistic. “When the French arrived, various European-style vendors [of tobacco and wine] suddenly appeared,” she writes, not bothering to consider the history of economic negotiation and cultural exchange that might well account for such speedy commercial enterprise. She drops intriguing hints about French attitudes toward “disposable” Egyptian women—after an outbreak of plague, for example, officials in Cairo ordered the drowning of all prostitutes “found having relations with a Frenchman” as a means of protecting the Europeans—but here too fails to fully explore the stories her sources prompt her to tell.
Timely, but disappointingly superficial.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-059767-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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