Eisler skillfully incorporates much correspondence within a frame of lively writing.
Largely expanded from her previous literary study, Chopin's Funeral (2003), Eisler's latest explores the ways in which the early French novelist Sand (1804–76) extracted her literary, intellectual and political sustenance from her numerous lovers.
As notorious for her free-loving personal life and cross-dressing fashion as for her atmospheric, revolutionary novels, Sand, née Aurore Dupin, learned early on that freedom for a woman was gained through linking oneself to a powerful man. Eisler goes well into this pleasant-going study on Sand's early sense of abandonment by her mother, Sophie Delaborde, a “pure-blooded daughter of the proletariat” and probable prostitute whose livelihood in Paris ensured that her daughter would be raised by her formidable grandmother at Aurore's dead father Maurice Dupin's Nohant estate. Sophie essentially sold her daughter to the rich Dupin relatives, and the tug of war between Aurore's grandmother and mother took its toll on the young girl. Liaisons with strong, intelligent men formed her early development, while marriage to minor Gascon Baron Casimir Dudevant brought her stimulation and travel, as well as two children. Separation and a dizzying succession of lovers—including affairs early on with the much younger Jules Sandeau, from whom Sand fashioned her nom de plume, and Le Figaro's powerful editor Henri Latouche—launched her on a literary career. Her first novel, Indiana (1832), about the failure of a miserable marriage set in a typically exotic outpost, swept Paris and set the tone for a succession of romances about proto-feminist relationships: Valentine, Lélia, Mauprat, etc. Curiously, Sand was also mightily attracted to weak-willed, brilliant younger men who needed maternal nursing, such as Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin, and Eisler does a fine job of trying to integrate the many sides of this complex writer and political activist without capitulating to her charm and fame. Indeed, Eisler remains a rather severe moral critic of this fascinating, and rule-bending, personality.
Eisler skillfully incorporates much correspondence within a frame of lively writing.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-349-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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