This biography of a lesser Madame de SÇvignÇ proves Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses was not merely a fictional study of sexual politics but an accurate portrait of aristocratic behavior in 18th- century France. Marie de Vichy-Champrond was born to a noble French family in 1696. But despite her high birth and convent education, Madame du Deffand (her married name) was, by Parisian social standards, a fallen woman by the age of 32. A divorcÇe known for her affairs, including a short-lived dalliance with the regent, the Duke of Orleans, that secured her a lifetime annuity, she spent over a decade redeeming her position by serving in the court of the Duchess of Maine and as a lover to the esteemed Charles-Jean- Franáois HÇnault, president of the AcadÇmie franáaise. At 51, she established what was to become Paris's most important literary salon—frequented by Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire- -where aristocrats and intellectuals came to trade influence and knowledge. Her correspondences with those who most engaged her passions—the Duchess of Maine, HÇnault, d'Alembert, her niece Julie de Lespinasse, Voltaire, and Horace Walpole—reveal her days to have been consumed with high-stakes social conquests and betrayals. Card games and coquetry aside, as a high priestess of the art of conversation, she exercised important influence on intellectual affairs. AcadÇmie franáaise elections became arenas for women to one-up their social competition with the seats won by their pet philosophes. Craveri (French Literature/Univ. of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy) fortifies every supposition, almost every page, with letters to, from, or about her subject. These letters, penned by masters like Walpole and Voltaire during the glory days of literary letter writing, not only substantiate Craveri's points but are minor literary works on their own. This impressive biography and history of French aristocratic intrigue rides more on the vitality of these quoted correspondences than on Craveri's solid, academic writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56792-001-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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