Palmer can write compelling popular histories—but in this case he is a bit like a pet owner who tries to interest you in his...
An attempt—only sometimes successful—to pull into the foreground of European history the relationship between the diminutive general and his second wife, whom he married by proxy, sight unseen.
Palmer (Victory 1918, 2000, etc.) has hopes for Marie Louise: “She is a more complex and interesting person than her detractors allow.” But there is little here to convince. The author begins with the birth of Marie Louise in 1791, shortly before her father became Francis II, the 54th Holy Roman Emperor since Charlemagne. Then he picks up Napoleon’s rise to power. For a while Palmer whisks us back and forth between the two, and he does manage to enliven Marie Louie’s story with some amusing detail—e.g., to keep her ignorant of sexual relations, her family permitted her to have only female pets. But the first half of the story covers well-trod ground (Napoleon’s career) and pays only a few dull visits to Marie Louise (one of which depicts the alarm she felt upon first learning that her father was considering her marriage to the notorious French devil). But Palmer does full justice to their dramatic first meeting—in a rainstorm the emotional young Corsican leapt into Marie Louise’s carriage and embraced the startled young woman. He also quotes Napoleon’s famous comment (made years later) on their first night together: “She liked it so much that she asked me to do it again.” They did indeed grow fond of each other: She bore him one son (whose remains the Nazis moved in 1940 to Paris to be with those of his father), but their relationship began to cool in the disastrous Russian campaign—and after Waterloo (which merits only part of a single sentence) they never saw each other again. She spent most of her life thereafter in Italy, where she died in 1847.
Palmer can write compelling popular histories—but in this case he is a bit like a pet owner who tries to interest you in his caged canary while an eagle soars around the room. (16 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: July 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28008-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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