by Joan Haslip ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1992
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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