Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun—complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that...
In Erickson’s fanciful retelling, Empress Josephine personifies, ahead of her time, the “head for business/bod for sin” dichotomy.
By dubbing this a “historical entertainment” rather than a historical novel, Erickson (The Last Wife of Henry VIII, 2006, etc.) avoids a more apt classification: gossipy historical romance. Josephine was born Rose, nickname Yeyette, to a failed sugar planter in Martinique. Her first and lifelong liaison is with Donovan de Gautier, a mysterious, sun-kissed adonis who introduces her to sex on the beach. Her platonic love is Scipion, a dashing lieutenant. Betrothed to cruel, foppish Vicomte Alexandre, Josephine journeys to Paris, where she wows the aristocracy with her Tarot fortunetelling. After bearing two children, she takes up money lending. During the French Revolution, she keeps her head; Alexandre is not so lucky. Impoverished, Josephine becomes the mistress of a wealthy military contractor. When she’s not dancing naked in the contractor’s orgy grotto, she’s feathering her own nest hawking substandard goods to the military, which is how she meets little corporal, now general Bonaparte. Josephine seemingly marries Napoleon out of curiosity, to see what happens next. Bonaparte’s coarse, scheming Corsican siblings and his harpy of a mother detest her. Bonaparte himself is so irascible, paranoiac, bilious and profligate, it’s a wonder he manages to conquer half the civilized world. Fortunately, readers share Josephine’s curiosity. How can she abide life with this monster, who castigates his older wife for failing to dress age-appropriately? He still runs cravenly to her for solace even after he’s divorced her to marry teenage Archduchess Marie-Louise. Fulfilling the destiny preordained for her by a shaman on Martinique, and following a comet, no less, Josephine travels to Russia, where she convinces Napoleon not to retreat from Moscow until the first snow—striking a blow not just for the first-wives club, but for the future of Europe!
Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun—complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that an Empire-waisted fashionista could desire.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36735-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
Just the thing for readers who’d like to channel their frustration over the current geopolitical mess into the traditional...
Deaver’s latest sabbatical from his Lincoln Rhyme series (The Vanished Man, 2003, etc.) sends him back before WWII to a Day of the Jackal remake with a good-guy assassin.
Hitler may be nothing but a psychopathic freak, but Americans in high places are watching apprehensively as his plans to rearm Germany move forward under retired Col. Reinhard Ernst, his Plenipotentiary for Domestic Stability. It’s vital that Ernst, with his encyclopedic knowledge and his keen vision of a militarized Reich, be eliminated. So the Office of Naval Intelligence, backed up by the obligatory carrot from millionaire industrialist Cyrus Clayhorn and the stick from law-enforcement agencies, sends a secret weapon on the Manhattan, the ship carrying the American athletes competing in the Berlin Olympics: Paul Schumann, a button man credited with 17 gangland executions. The plan calls for Paul to meet with Reggie Morgan, the ONI officer who’ll help him get settled and provide a weapon and the inside info he’ll need for a successful hit. Even aboard the Manhattan, however, things start to go wrong, and Paul’s first meeting with Reggie ends with the shooting of a storm trooper whose death will surely bring the dread resources of the SS and the Gestapo down on them. As his mission spirals out of control and he hears Hitler’s tirelessly efficient police closing in on him, Paul finds himself leaning more and more on people like Käthe Richter, his landlady, and Otto Webber, a raffish black marketeer, and wondering whether Deaver’s well-earned reputation for boffo surprises will give him a chance to fire that rifle after all.
Just the thing for readers who’d like to channel their frustration over the current geopolitical mess into the traditional American values of cleverness, adaptability, and vigilante violence in the best of all possible causes.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2201-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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