Swift, informed and literate—a substantial though conventional life of a legend.
A former correspondent for The Economist considers the life of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), wise and circumspect adviser to kings, an emperor and even a few enemies of France.
There may never have been a political survivor like Talleyrand, a man with a soaring career in the Church which he surrendered when he saw greater fame, fortune, sex and power in politics. (On his deathbed, he artfully negotiated official forgiveness.) Lawday’s architecture is functional, if not artful. He begins with an explosive moment in 1809, as Napoleon raged against Talleyrand, who somehow remained placid. The author then moves backward to summarize Talleyrand’s family history (aristocratic—engendering both admiration and envy in Napoleon), chronicle his entrance both into the Church and into Parisian society and describe how he avoided the Reign of Terror. Talleyrand was able to convince Danton to give him a passport, which he promptly used to sail across the Channel to temporize until the Terror subsided. But the English expelled him, so he sailed to Philadelphia, where he befriended Alexander Hamilton (George Washington did not care for him), saw Niagara Falls and made efforts to re-establish his personal fortune. By 1876 he was back in (safer) France, and the next year he met Napoleon, who was 28 at the time (Talleyrand was 44). Talleyrand quickly established himself as a trusted adviser to Napoleon, who responded by enriching him. But as Lawday persuasively shows, Talleyrand soon soured on the aggressive Corsican, believing he was interested more in personal glory and military conquest than in achieving any balance of power in Europe—or in accepting any rational concept of “Europe” at all. And—secretly, carefully—he worked to undermine his own Emperor. The author deals swiftly with the post-Napoleon years, including some surprising returns to glory for Talleyrand, and he does not neglect the expected discussions of Talleyrand’s club foot and his sexual conquests, which, the author notes, he found less stimulating than political ones.
Swift, informed and literate—a substantial though conventional life of a legend.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37297-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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