Learned, sophisticated and amusing at times—and invariably enlightening.
A former professor (Humanistic Studies/Princeton Univ.) shows that the intellectual glow of the Enlightenment contended with the forces of religious faith, superstition and quackery.
Fleming (The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War, 2009, etc.) acknowledges that he comes at his new subject with an educated amateur’s credentials. However, his learned but reader-friendly text undercuts his modesty. The author deals principally with significant, illustrative figures from the period—names unfamiliar to many—beginning with Valentine Greatrakes, a man who discovered he could touch and cure those afflicted with scrofula. Fleming notes that Greatrakes refused to take payment or otherwise profit from his successes—and there were many. Next, the author turns to the Convulsionists, those who experienced convulsions and were healed by novenas spoken at the Saint-Médard cemetery. He follows with long sections about the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, carefully charting their history while pausing occasionally to point out contemporary analogies. Then, he turns his attention to the “occult arts”—magic, sorcery and alchemy—and spends some time describing the equipment alchemists used and explaining the aims of their practices. He ends with critical biographies of two remarkable individuals, Alessandro Cagliostro, who rose quickly as a healer, then fell when he was associated with the scandal involving a priceless necklace (Marie Antoinette appears here); and Julie de Krüdener, who rose to prominence as a novelist (with the help of Madame de Staël), then turned to religion and numerology before her tumble from fame. Fleming continually steps back to point out the survival of some of these ideas in modern life—President Ronald Reagan, for example, was a chiliast, or one who held a “historical or theological view based on an interpretation of the Apocalypse, and by extension any attempt to apply Bible prophecy to an interpretation of secular history.”
Learned, sophisticated and amusing at times—and invariably enlightening.Pub Date: July 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-07946-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Strong reporting and storytelling skills combine to make this remembrance of Paris past a fine read. A Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, Karnow (Vietnam, A History, 1983, etc.) apprenticed as a writer in postwar Paris, working his way up through the local bureau of Henry Luce's magazine empire. His long dispatches were generally filed away or, if published, cut drastically. But Karnow kept his carbon copies; here he distills that 1,000 pages of reportage into a memoir that artfully blends carefully detailed immediacy with considered personal reflection. The first few chapters, in which Karnow describes struggling as a GI Bill student in Paris and his subsequent initiation into the character-filled milieu of the Paris-based foreign press, seem somewhat insubstantial; but they are really only the set-up for the series of incisive reports that follow. Once past the requisite recounting of encounters with celebrities (Audrey Hepburn dazzles, Ernest Hemingway disappoints), Karnow uncorks a string of impressively realized chapters devoted to a wide variety of topics. They include le monde (a.k.a. the world of Parisian fashionables) and also the demimonde of striptease artists, prostitutes, and criminals; the intellectual circles of ``the mandarins,'' and also the French passion for car racing; the gastronomic divinations of the gourmand Curnonsky, Christian Dior's reign over the fashion world, and the strange career of Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, known as Monsieur de Paris, the city's guillotine operator. All the while, Karnow travels much further into French cultural history than his title might suggest. He never fails to provide historical context; one of his best passages retraces Ho Chi Minh's sojourn in Paris in the late 'teens and early twenties, long before he bedeviled France as leader of the Vietminh. Even the most jaded Francophile will find much stimulation here—indeed, so will any fan of punchy prose and intelligent observation and reflection.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8129-2781-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
A richly informative, if highly problematic, overview of anti- Jewish bigotry and violence between the 1870s, when the term ``anti-Semitism'' was coined, and the Holocaust. Lindemann (History/Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara), who has written previously on Dreyfus and other anti-Semitic cases, here focuses largely on Germany and France, with lesser attention to Russia, Great Britain, the US, Italy, Hungary, and Romania. (Curiously, a section on the interwar years almost entirely omits Poland, a country with a deep anti-Semitic tradition.) He correctly posits an indirect line between the racist anti-Semitism that characterized the beginning of the period and what Daniel Goldhagen calls the ``eliminationist'' ethos that led to the Holocaust. Lindemann also makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of both long-term socioeconomic and short-term political contingencies behind the expression of anti-Semitism. He reveals the ``comparative quality and texture in expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment'' by demonstrating that most major anti-Semites and philo-Semites were more complex than their labels would indicate. However, Lindemann's penchant for nuance ultimately takes its toll. While there is an indisputable correlation between the rise of Jewish power and influence during the 19th and 20th centuries and the intensification of political and intellectual anti-Semitism, the author comes very close to suggesting that there is a clear-cut causal relationship between the two. Thus, he refers to modern anti-Semitism as ``transparently an ideology of revenge'' and alludes to the supposed ``Jewish sense of superiority (including certain kinds of measurable Jewish superiority) and the envy/hatred it has engendered.'' Finally, Lindemann, who calls for scholars to engage in a nonpolemical study of anti-Semitism, himself lapses into highly charged statements and rhetorical questions in an odd, rambling conclusion. There's much provocative, compelling material here, but the author's conclusions are too often contradictory or unpersuasive.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-521-59369-7
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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