by Fenton Bresler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1999
A fresh and lively look at the other Napoleon, by London journalist Bresler (Who Killed John Lennon?, 1989, etc.) For all those who know nothing of the Second Empire beyond furniture, Bresler offers a thoroughly enjoyable look at Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, who became first President and then Emperor of France from 1848 to 1870. Bresler begins by elucidating the facts of Napoleon’s birth and pre-birth (Napoleon III’s spawning was orchestrated by his Emperor-uncle, who needed a male heir to the throne, but was unable to conceive one at the time, through an arranged marriage between his stepdaughter and his brother), then covers his childhood and exile in England. The account picks up steam upon Napoleon’s return to France during the tumultuous 1848 revolutions, when he was championed by the monarchists. He was first elected to the Assembly, then to the Presidency, and crowned Emperor when the Constitution was invalidated. Under his reign, France’s economy expanded, Paris was modernized—although he also managed to embroil France in a variety of conflicts including the Crimean War, the annexation of Savoy and Nice, and the thoroughly ill-conceived expedition to Mexico. The perverse masterstroke for which he will forever be remembered was his declaration of war on Prussia, which caused his swift downfall when he showed little of his uncle’s military prowess. Bresler, through his use of both published and unpublished sources, shows Napoleon III to be a brave and compelling leader, a canny politician, and an unselfish sovereign—as one modern critic described him, “a nineteenth-century De Gaulle, dedicated only to fulfilling his country’s greatness.” A fascinating look at Second Empire France and the little-studied “petit-Napoleon.”
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0660-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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