The French philosophe’s ebullient, incredibly productive years in exile, admirably drawn by the London Financial Times’ former foreign-affairs columnist.
Louis XV was not interested in inviting Voltaire back into the Versailles fold when, in 1753, the writer sought to return from Potsdam. So this leading member of the Enlightenment, ever to be an individualist and outsider, settled in Geneva, where he promptly garnered the Calvinist establishment’s censure. Drawing on what he calls Voltaire’s “meta-autobiography,” a luxurious 15,000 letters collected by his executors from across Europe, Davidson above all traces his subject’s moral development. During these years, the writer crusaded against “superstition, theological repression, Jesuits, monks, fanatical regicides, and the Inquisition in every shape.” He wrote the skewering Candide. He became a landowner and gained a measure of appreciation for the everyday suffering of the toilers in his fields at Ferney. Davidson ably tenders the push-pull of Voltaire’s convictions: he campaigned against miscarriages of justice, particularly as they pertained to Christian fanaticism and the repressive alliance between church and state, but he was anti-Semitic and accepted the need for capital punishment and torture. Often seen as a philosophical forerunner of the French Revolution, in fact he condemned the popular voice (“which is almost always absurd”) and firmly believed in the rights and responsibilities of a quasi-feudal order. Overriding these fissures, however, is Voltaire’s sense of tolerance, his witty brevity in writing for the common man, and his willingness to poke a finger in the eye of powermongers. Davidson imbues the Frenchman’s life with the warmth of his personality, detailing his relationship with Mme. Denis, his love of wine and food, and his ongoing affection for the theater, his gardens, and his multitude of acquaintances.
A well-tempered work from whose pages Voltaire gracefully and realistically rises: wiser, more caring and generous, always eloquent as the years gain upon him. (8 pp. b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1791-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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