For fans of Laclos and De Staël, an overstuffed portrait of a long-gone era.
Wide-ranging history of a doomed generation of French aristocrats whose world would come to an end with the storming of the Bastille in 1789.
Craveri, an Italian professor of French literature, opens with Saint-Beuve’s famous observation, “It is always a beautiful thing to be twenty years old.” So it is, she allows, but especially for the young generation that came up around the time of the reign of Louis XVI. Some brilliant and some merely rich idlers, the seven historical figures she portrays as representative of their class had not just wealth and nobility at their command; they also took note, to varying degrees, of the Enlightenment ideals that were springing up around them. Four of her subjects were counts, two dukes, one a mere “chevalier,” but all understood, by Craveri’s account, that the meritocratic ideal of thinkers like Diderot mattered less than the accident of their birth. Some of the author’s characters hitched their fortunes to the star that was Marie Antoinette, the “ravishing, frivolous queen.” But then, the nobility as a whole tended toward the frivolous, given to intensely public displays of consumption, campaigns of gaining royal favor, court intrigues, and the usual affairs, all expressions of what the author calls “classical libertinism.” (She adds that the habit of the extramarital affair “played the role of corrective for a matrimonial institution indifferent to the wishes of its contracting parties.”) Craveri’s narrative is long, winding, and leisurely, as the author takes her time getting to the French Revolution and the arrival of the guillotine, which took some—but not all—of the aristocrats off the stage. Indeed, there’s a hint of Balzac to the prose, which has some nice moments, as when she writes of one social climber, “Julie was too proud to submit to the logic of caste that relegated her to the margins of society.”
For fans of Laclos and De Staël, an overstuffed portrait of a long-gone era. (20 illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-340-9
Page Count: 680
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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