General readers may prefer to dip into the pages of Laclos or Hugo for a taste of the time. Levi’s take is mainly for...
A slow-moving, thorough life of the French monarch by a noted literary historian.
Levi extends the narrative begun in his Cardinal Richelieu (2000) to the son of the weak-willed, out-of-touch Louis XIII. It’ll be tempting for some to read XIV’s life as a 16th-century analog of the current American president’s, for Louis was callow and proud of it. Writes Levi, he “is reliably thought to have disliked studying from books” and acquired only a little knowledge of Latin, the language of learning and—tellingly—international diplomacy; moreover, on attaining the throne, he surrounded himself with his father’s cronies, many of whom had grown up under the long shadow of Cardinal Richelieu, and spent a lot of time governing from the distance of Versailles, which he imagined to be a sort of typical village. The French people were dispirited by his myriad missteps in office, but, for all that, “his charm could inspire popularity in the midst of the anguish his policies were inflicting on them”—policies in part caused by the monarch’s “inclination to the pursuit of military glory as conferring or demonstrating the highest form of human honor.” Yet Louis XIV was more than an ingénue, and by Levi’s account the Sun King, who half believed in his own divinity, sought to perform at least some good deeds to lessen the suffering of the most unfortunate of France’s people. Levi paints a thorough warts-and-all portrait of Louis, though the prose is sometimes thick and plodding, as with this representative aside: “He was in the 1680s still trapped in the role in which the painters and sculptors of the baroque had cast him, exaggerated, magnified, distorted to maximum tension in the interests of inspiring awe, status, and grandeur, in as strongly lit and unachievable and certainly as unsustainable a pose as any to be found in a van Dyck painting.”
General readers may prefer to dip into the pages of Laclos or Hugo for a taste of the time. Levi’s take is mainly for specialists.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1309-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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