Artfully observed, the bawdy and political wiles—for better and worse—of Madame de Pompadour. (8 pp. color illustrations)
Though bodices are ripped at the outset, French historian and biographer Lever (Marie Antoinette, not reviewed) settles down to offer an astute portrait of Madame de Pompadour in the court of Louis XV.
It was no mean feat for the parvenu Madame Le Normant d’Etiolles to become the “favorite” of Louis XV, the recognized mistress to the king. She had wealth—and a husband and child, for that matter—but she was no aristocrat. Louis’s ministers were wary, the court frowned, yet she was just the breath of fresh air the king needed, someone who was sensual enough to match his cravings, who tended his melancholia and kept him amused, who respected the Queen and the court’s way of doing things. Lever sings her charms from the start: “flawless white teeth and dimpled cheeks . . . the bewitching, tender, insistent gaze of her gray eyes, which burned at times with an incandescent light.” She also had brains and poise, learning the nuances of court etiquette, finding her way through the tangle of rites and intrigues. Louis admired her joie de vivre, and soon found he desired her mediation when granting favors as well. Gradually, Lever explains, Madame de Pompadour lost her role as lover but emerged as a power in the political sphere because she kept Louis’s favor. Despite Lever’s feeling that her initiatives were “motivated as much by her love for the monarch as by her resentment for personal enemies,” her influence with Louis was felt keenly in the wars with England and Prussia, the conflict between Parliament and the clergy, and negotiations with the pope. Lever details why Madame de Pompadour was never a favorite with the common folk, whose resentments ran the gamut from the gifts lavished on her to her association with French military defeats and woeful treaties.
Artfully observed, the bawdy and political wiles—for better and worse—of Madame de Pompadour. (8 pp. color illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-11308-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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