An acutely sensitive group portrait of the women who basked in the Sun King’s reflected glory.
Altogether at ease with the mores of the ancien régime, Fraser (Marie Antoinette, 2001, etc.) eschews a detailed biography of Louis XIV to focus instead on the women who shaped and were shaped by France’s most glorious ruler.
He was king for 72 years, time enough to build Versailles, wage numerous, mostly unsuccessful, wars and accumulate a rich history with the opposite sex. Louis’s mother, Queen Anne, gave birth at 36—a then-astoundingly late stage in life for pregnancy—lending an immediate air of the miraculous to the future monarch. Anne established an unusually close relationship with her son, who never entirely erased from his mind her mixture of beauty and piety as a template of female perfection. Louis abandoned his teenage liaison with the unsuitable Marie Mancini to marry Spanish Infanta Maria Teresa. As Queen Marie-Thérèse, she accommodated two important mistresses, Louise de La Vallière and the Marquise de Montespan, and drew from Louis the final tribute that she gave him no trouble except by dying. After Marie-Thérèse, he secretly married Madame de Maintenon, whose demeanor was remarkably like that of his mother. Fraser paints each of these women in full and offers sketches of a succession of minor mistresses, one night stands, sisters-in-law (including the hilariously vulgar and bitchy wife of Louis’s homosexual brother), princesses and even an exiled foreign queen, all of whom engaged the king’s genuine interest. To help keep track of this large cast, the profusion of changing titles and the dizzying succession of bastards, the author provides a useful guide to the principal characters. Courtiers meticulously charted the king’s amorous adventures, and Fraser excels at reproducing the hothouse atmosphere in which the monarch’s raised eyebrow might portend a serious change in someone’s fortune. Uncomfortably aware of the Church’s opposition to his notorious love life, Louis fully indulged himself during his heyday before turning in old age to a greater concern for his salvation.
An acutely sensitive group portrait of the women who basked in the Sun King’s reflected glory.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-50984-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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