Rich in detail, plodding in pace. (24 pages b&w photos)
A lavish but sluggish life of the Sun King (1638–1715) by architectural historian and biographer Dunlop (Marie-Antoinette, not reviewed).
Dunlop begins by asserting that Louis was “one of the greatest characters who have played an important role on the stage of French history,” but he unfortunately expends more energy describing the scenery than either the players or the plot. His principal thesis is that Louis throughout his life indulged two passions—building and warfare. There are no novelties of narrative here: the first chapter contains an account of Louis’ birth; the last, a description of his death. In the intervening pages are very detailed (and often striking) accounts of his education, coronation (he was anointed with oil said to have been “brought by a dove from Heaven”), marriage, lovers (many of whom, quips Dunlop, subsequently exchanged “Louis’ bed for a cell in a nunnery”), intrigues, battles, construction projects, religious struggles, and medical problems (including an explicit account of the surgery to remove an anal fistula). The story fails to engage, however, because Dunlop has not found a swift narrative horse to carry the burden of the massive detail he has accumulated. Much of it is fascinating (e.g., the winter of 1708–09 was so cold that communion wine froze in the chalices), but it is more often decorative than propulsive. A further impediment arises from the decision to have no endnotes, forcing Dunlop to include in the text much peripheral information—e.g., preceding his account of Louis’ death is a long, dull paragraph on source material. Another dubious decision was to leave untranslated many of the French quotations. Dunlop is most interested in the remarkable architecture of the period, and his accounts of the construction of Versailles, the Louvre, and other structures bristle with confidence and competence. Describing the chapel at Versailles, he writes: “The bas-reliefs of the arcading on the ground floor, seen from the tribunes, give a delicate, brocade-like texture to the stone.”
Rich in detail, plodding in pace. (24 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26196-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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