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 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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