An obsequiously titled but ultimately compelling study of the legacy of Louis XIV’s reign.
Once past the gloppy generalizations that try needlessly to snare the interest of nonscholars by dropping insipid anachronisms like “ladies who lunched” and “interior decoration’s ultimate bling-bling,” DeJean (French/Univ. of Pennsylvania) provides an intelligent, well-documented history of the luxury items taken for granted today that have also defined the culture of France. Essentially, the long, glorious rule of the Sun King, from 1660 to 1715, “unleashed desires that now seem fundamental” and inaugurated a program for redefining France as the land of luxury and glamour, often through a ruthless cornering of the market. As Louis’s obsession with style created the desire for fantastically luxurious goods, such as shoes, hosiery, diamonds and mirrors, his wily protectionist prime minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, worked with the business elite to ensure that France would become a mercantile superpower. The profession of the coiffeur, for example, seems to have been single-handedly invented by le sieur Champagne, whose unique touch with aristocratic hairdos instigated the first “brand recognition.” DeJean examines the important tool of the “fashion plates,” literally engravings, that served to advertise the luxurious new goods to the public, while Donneau de Vise’s newspaper, Le Mercure galant, became the first fashion organ aimed at provincial women dreaming of becoming as chic as the great ladies of Versailles. La Varenne brought butter and vegetables into the kitchen; cafes sprang up to serve the new coffee beverage and provide people with somewhere to go in a city newly lighted by state-of-the-art lanterns; and champagne, thanks to the tireless trial-and-error of the cellar master of Hautvillers, Dom Perignon, exploded on the scene. DeJean does a superb job of rendering comprehensible the new technology of mirror-making, while she relegates to a footnote, unfortunately, the ascendancy during this period of the classical French language.
Readers low and high will find this a winning companion, with excellent sources.Pub Date: July 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6413-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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