A clear account of one man’s failure to recognize the fanged creatures that swim in waves of passion and popularity.
The rise and fall of Georges-Jacques Danton (1759–1794), whose booming voice and fervid passion animated both the French Revolution that honored him and the Terror that took his head.
Former Economist correspondent Lawday, who first developed an interest in Danton while working on a previous biography (Napoleon’s Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand, 2007), recognized that his subject presented challenges. Danton didn’t like to write and left virtually no revealing personal documents. Nonetheless, the author ably assembles a convincing portrait of a man of giant stature, appetite, ability and ego. Lawday begins in 1789 on the day after the fall of the Bastille as young Danton, just 29, arrives at the site and, his voice roaring, immediately announces his presence on the revolutionary stage. The author then sketches Danton’s early story: his birth in the Champagne region and some early childhood experiences that sound almost mythic (he was suckled by a cow, wounded in the face by a bull. Big, strong and ugly, Danton was also bright and ambitious and soon began the pursuit of a legal career in Paris. Lawday rehearses the principal causes of the Revolution and gradually introduces the principal players, including Mirabeau, Lafayette, Madame Roland, Marat, Thomas Paine, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the unsmiling villain of the piece, Robespierre. The author also tracks Danton’s personal life, which included his beloved first wife (who died in childbirth—Danton’s reaction is horrifying and wrenching) and his 16-year-old second wife, whom he swiftly married. “He was thirty-three years old,” writes Lawday, “and he needed the closeness of a woman’s body.” The author ably follows his subject’s maneuvers into positions of authority, his confounding combination of cruelty and compassion and his underestimation of Robespierre, who engineered Danton’s death shortly before his own date with the national razor.
A clear account of one man’s failure to recognize the fanged creatures that swim in waves of passion and popularity.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1933-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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