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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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