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 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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