In this brief romantic biography of the last mistress of Louis XV, Haslip (Marie Antoinette, 1988, etc.), now 80, brings a special charm to the story of du Barry (1743-93), whose legendary beauty brought both rewards and penalties: power, wealth, envy, fear, and, ultimately, death. Illegitimate child of a French peasant, Jeanne Beáu was educated in a convent until, at 15, she emerged a golden-haired, lisping beauty who worked as a hairdresser and a milliner's assistant—but who was, in fact, a prostitute. Discovered by Jean du Barry, a dissolute gambler and pimp to the aristocracy, she was introduced at Versailles, where Louis XV, 58, a widower, became infatuated with her. After her hasty and unconsummated marriage to Jean's brother, Guillaume, comte du Barry, Mme. du Barry became the king's official mistress and one of the wealthiest women in France, a wealth she shared with, among others, her beloved ``niece,'' Betsi, whom Haslip ``suspects'' may have been her illegitimate daughter. Mme. du Barry was also hated, especially by Marie Antoinette, who arranged to have her imprisoned after the death of Louis. Released after one year, Mme. du Barry recovered her jewels, her estate, and a series of lovers, including an English neighbor who ultimately rejected her—a ``little-known'' story that Haslip reveals. In the early stages of the Revolution, Mme. du Barry traveled often to England, possibly as a courier for ÇmigrÇs but ostensibly to try to recover stolen jewels that had been impounded there. She returned to France only to be beheaded for her aristocratic associations. Although more extensive, scholarly, and even popular biographies of du Barry are available, this one has a particular appreciation for the decorative arts that women like du Barry cultivated—arts that included the remaking of themselves—and for the hazards of beauty when it comes close to political power. The lavish language recalls the style of Regency novels, for which this could serve as a reference. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1256-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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