Pauline’s blandishments grow quickly tedious, but Fraser does a lively job of delineating the story of her audacious clan.
Napoleon’s younger sister—beautiful but not particularly compelling—receives effusive treatment from English biographer Fraser (Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, 2005, etc.).
The author relies on Napoleon’s riveting odyssey to propel the insipid life story of Pauline Bonaparte (1780–1825), whose legendary milk baths were the most interesting thing about her. Their fates moved in tandem: Napoleon determined whom his favorite sister would wed, and the two marriages he arranged would mark her fortune, mostly for good. In 1796, with her brother fresh from victories as head of the Army of Italy, Pauline was a vivacious, unschooled 15-year-old refugee from Corsica, living with her widowed mother and large close-knit family in Marseille. She fell in love with the wealthy, much older Stanislas Fréron, but Napoleon came down firmly against the match—luckily, it turned out, as Fréron was denounced as an embezzler and disgraced. Instead, her brother chose his loyal second-in-command, brigade general Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, who proved an honorable, upright man but no match for his sensual, spoiled teenaged spouse. Marginalized as Napoleon’s star rose, Leclerc was sent to quell Toussaint Louverture’s uprising in Saint-Domingue in 1802. Native resistance and the pestilential climate quickly defeated the French. Leclerc died of yellow fever within a year, and Pauline returned to Paris to join her vastly enriched family, elevated by Napoleon’s position as first consul for life. Another advantageous suitor soon materialized, and Pauline wed Prince Camillo Borghese, a Roman citizen of high birth and huge wealth. He was also a “booby,” notes Fraser, as ignorant and good-looking as Pauline, but not as cunning. The match proved disastrous, and Pauline ran through lovers until nearly the last year of her life. She remained loyal to the end to her brother, even setting up a household for him on Elba.
Pauline’s blandishments grow quickly tedious, but Fraser does a lively job of delineating the story of her audacious clan.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26544-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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