by Andrea Stuart ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2004
Unfailingly interesting: a sturdy life of a woman often overlooked in the vast library of Napoleonic studies.
A sometimes florid but engaging life of Napoleon’s true love, a woman ill served by circumstances.
Marie-Josèphe-Rose-Claire des Vergers de Tascher de la Pagarie was born on a plantation in Martinique, “a complicated place during a tumultuous time,” a voluptuous island that had just narrowly escaped becoming a British possession: “In a treaty concluded with Britain in 1763, when presented with the choice of holding on to Canada . . . or to the commercially and strategically important ‘sugar islands’ . . . the French chose the latter,” writes Critical Quarterly fiction editor Stuart (Showgirls, not reviewed). The French decision was fateful, for it kept Martiniquaise society well within Paris’s orbit; thus it was that young Rose came to France, “plump, provincial, and adolescent,” intended for the nobleman Alexandre de Beauharnais, whom students of French literature remember as the model for Valmont in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons. It wasn’t a happy marriage, writes Stuart, but it brought Rose into the best circles of aristocratic Paris, a dangerous place to be in revolutionary times—“it is hard to imagine that she escaped the profound disturbances which beset her contemporaries, many of whom reported a litany of psychological and physical disorders including nightmares, sleeplessness, anxiety and depression,” Stuart writes—but a good place to be noticed. Notice her Napoleon Bonaparte, himself an island-born outsider, did, and Stuart writes lucidly of their seemingly improbable romance, improbable, perhaps, because the young woman whom Napoleon would call Josephine had become a beauty, whereas Napoleon was a “small, sickly man” who was, a contemporary said, “given to inappropriate outbursts of laughter which did little to endear him to others.” Romance became partnership, and Stuart credits Rose/Josephine for her enlightened influence over the dictator, who famously divorced her while in exile on Elba for her inability to produce an heir to the throne.
Unfailingly interesting: a sturdy life of a woman often overlooked in the vast library of Napoleonic studies.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1770-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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