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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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