A briskly written account of a time when high fashion took death’s hand and danced.
Marie Antoinette’s extravagant sartorial style represented the height of French fashion in the 18th century, even as it provided her myriad enemies with symbols potent enough to help foment the monarchy’s overthrow.
Weber (French/Barnard Coll.) has written previously about the revolutionary period (Terror and Its Discontents, 2003, not reviewed), and her comprehensive, entertaining latest work suggests that she has studied just about every other important history—academic and popular—covering the reign of Louis XVI and his controversial consort. Although there is probably little new to say about this unhappy couple, their story will forever engage with its unparalleled combination of haute lifestyle and unspeakable violence. (Mercifully, the author keeps the king’s and queen’s executions offstage.) Weber focuses on Marie Antoinette’s clothing, emblematic of her sense of style, her outrageous expenditures and her tragic inability to comprehend the public’s perceptions of her and her excesses. Weber’s task is made difficult by two factors. First, virtually none of this clothing now exists, having been destroyed by angry mobs or stolen by souvenir-hunters. So we are left with contemporaneous written descriptions, portraits and parodies. Second, the story of the young queen’s rise and fall is so engrossing that Weber sometimes finds it hard to turn our attention away from history’s explosions to look at her subject’s latest ridiculous pouf or silk-and-satin extravagance. This ultimately serves, then, as yet another biography of Marie Antoinette, another history of the French Revolution. Still, the fashion segments are fun to read and researched with consummate attention to detail, as 80 pages of endnotes certify. When the royal couple is finally imprisoned, the author does a splendid job of explaining how their political fall was mirrored in their dress. Her account of the queen’s final appearance—all in glorious white—on the ride to the guillotine carries enormous poignancy.
A briskly written account of a time when high fashion took death’s hand and danced.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7949-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
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