Bruce's parallel biography is an intricate and intimate profile that reveals a charismatic Napoleon obsessed with glory and...
In her first book, historian Bruce reconstructs the lives, courtship and marriage of Napoleon and Josephine with a wealth of details.
In 1796, the luxury-loving Josephine, born to an aristocratic family and widowed as a result of the French Revolution, accepted the awkward, newly renowned Napoleon with reluctance. Initially "an improbable marriage,'' it evolved into a reflection of French society under the Empire, characterized by unbridled ambition, reckless politics, hypocrisy, and sycophancy. Napoleon's misogyny surfaced in his many liaisons and cruel comments ("Two things become a woman: rouge and tears''); Josephine found solace in the accoutrements of power and a handsome cavalry officer. Using their private correspondence, Bruce reveals the psychological hold that each had on the other. Napoleon's letters from the field are sometimes playful, often pleading, and occasionally erotic. Although he once wrote to her, "I have always been able to impose my will on destiny,'' there is an undercurrent of despair in the letters that a separation from her would entail catastrophe for his own fate. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Terror, France yearned for order and peace. Napoleon paid lip service to the ideals, but his real goal was total mastery over France and Europe. Bruce's portrait of Josephine as petty, vain, and frivolous is just as unsympathetic. After Napoleon seized power in 1799, the dynamics of their relationship were reversed: Realizing that the failure to produce a male heir put her at risk of divorce, Josephine became pathetic in trying to retain her position. Their divorce in 1810 signaled, as Napoleon had foreseen, the end to his brilliant military and political victories. In truth, his fall was caused by his suppression of liberalism and nationalism—the two most powerful ideologies of the 19th century.
Bruce's parallel biography is an intricate and intimate profile that reveals a charismatic Napoleon obsessed with glory and the all-too-human Josephine desperate for love.Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-517810-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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