A historian's lively and persuasive attempt to strip away the mystery surrounding the notorious 18th-century French cross- dresser, diplomat, writer, and spy, Chevalier (or Chevaliäre) d'Eon. D'Eon was thought to be a man for most of his life. He was a distinguished soldier, diplomat, and confidant of King Louis XV's. He consorted with some of the most famous figures of his time—from Voltaire and Rousseau to David Hume and Benjamin Franklin. Then, when he was nearly 50 years old, he was ``revealed'' to be a woman. He lived the remaining 35 years of his life as a ``she,'' only to be proved, upon his death, a biologically ordinary man after all. The fascinating story of how and why he did it is examined by Kates (Trinity Univ.; The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution, not reviewed), who argues that d'Eon was neither a transvestite nor a transsexual, but rather a man who made an intellectual decision to cross the gender barrier based on his professional and religious aims. His diplomatic career had reached an impasse and he hoped greater opportunities might be made available to him as a woman; also he became increasingly religious, believing that women made better Christians and were morally superior to men. However, while the chevalier was successful in his masquerade and helpful in furthering women's equality, he was largely unsuccessful in his goals. D'Eon's career ended with his feminization, and the Revolution of 1789 stripped him of his government stipend; he died poor and relatively obscure. Overall a coherent story, though there are some missing pieces: the silence of d'Eon's mother and sister, who were alive during his gender transformation, is not sufficiently explained, and though he appears to have been a virgin his whole life, the question of d'Eon's sexual orientation is left unaddressed. Nonetheless, a wonderful window into 18th-century France and a valuable biographical study of a compelling historical figure.
Pub Date: June 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-04761-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
