LOUIS XIV

Name: LOUIS XIV
Author: Anthony Levi
ISBN: 0-7867-1309-7

by Anthony Levi ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2004

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...

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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

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)