A captivating, diverse study of an equally fascinating figure.
An ambitious portrait that concentrates on the enlightened monarch’s intellectual (rather than military) achievements.
From an early age, Frederick the Great (1712–86) was an avid reader and flutist, much to the chagrin of his warlike, overbearing father, Frederick William I. At 18, Frederick was imprisoned and courtmartialled (and a friend of his was executed) for plotting to flee his father’s dull court for France, where he intended to realize his artistic and literary dreams. Having failed in his escape, Frederick had a strict regimen of political and religious study imposed on the young prince—one that served him well during the Seven Years War (when he faced, and defeated, almost all the other European powers combined). Frederick turned Prussia into a force to be reckoned with: he added territory to the kingdom, further modernized the army, encouraged religious tolerance, and implemented sweeping legal reform. But his major accomplishment as portrayed by MacDonogh (Berlin, 1998) was his patronage of the arts, particularly his correspondence with Voltaire. MacDonogh intersperses scenes of war throughout Germany with Frederick’s exchange of letters with the philosopher. The two maintained a lovehate relationship for 42 years, their letters filling three volumes of Frederick’s collected writings. Voltaire, forever greedy for more royal indulgences, runs between Versailles and Potsdam—at one point being arrested at the border by Prussian soldiers who feared that he might publish some of Frederick’s more bawdy poems. Frederick, his admiration for Voltaire bordering on obsession, tolerates the philosopher even when the French king employs him as a spy. As Frederick did so much in the military arena, however, it’s impossible not to devote space to that material. MacDonogh traces Frederick’s conquests, but never with the same gusto as when he discusses his turbulent relations with intellectuals. As a result, as a military history, the work suffers in depth what it gains in breadth, with the cultural history making up for the loss.
A captivating, diverse study of an equally fascinating figure.Pub Date: April 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25318-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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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