by Christine Pevitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1997
A tantalizing glimpse of a lost world. Although she asks the question in her preface, Pevitt never directly reveals an answer as to why someone at the end of the 20th century would become obsessed with someone dead for 300 years. Readers are forced to answer that question themselves, and they might be glad that Pevitt became so involved in a figure who, until now, has not received sympathetic treatment in English. French historians have for some time now been taking a new look at the duc d`OrlÇans, recognizing that he was much more than the philanderer and intellectual lightweight he had been made out to be. When his uncle the Sun King, Louis XIV, died in 1715, a remarkable era came to an end. While the five-year-old Louis XV became de jure king, it was Philippe who actually ruled as regent. In some ways a Renaissance man (he was a musician and artist as well as a soldier and statesman), Philippe delighted in shocking the more conventional members of the royal family and court. Extraordinary rumors (including the claim that he had slept with his own daughter) circulated through aristocratic circles. This, though, seems to have been a calculated strategy to hide his rather formidable talents. As regent, Pevitt argues, he displayed considerable iamgination and energy. He worked hard to rebuild the country's armed forces, began negotiations with England, France's ancient antagonist, and did what he could to spur on emigration to North America. (His efforts are indicated by the fact that New Orleans was named in his honor). Pevitt is not a professional historian, but this in no way detracts from her work; in fact, readers might find her style refreshing and thankfully free from academic pretensions. It seems that she wrote the book for no other reason than that the subject fascinated her—and what better reason could a reader ask for in an author?
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87113-695-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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