Wilkinson offers little in the way of passion or illumination to enliven this account of the dazzling reign of the Sun King.
A new biography of “the most legendary king ever to sit on the throne of France.”
In this surprisingly dry treatment, British biographer Wilkinson (The Princes in the Tower: Did Richard III Murder His Nephews, Edward V & Richard of York?, 2015, etc.) focuses more on the king’s romantic entanglements than on his acts and legacy. For a staggering 72 years, Louis XIV (1638-1715) reigned over an efflorescent France, inheriting the throne at age 4 in 1643 and ruling until just shy of age 77 in 1715. Early on during his reign, he was under the wing of his regent mother, Anne, and influential minister Cardinal Mazarin, and he saw France through numerous costly wars with his European neighbors, conflicts that allowed the country to enjoy political predominance, key annexations, and a flourishing French culture. Schooled by the Jesuits and in the statecraft of the crafty Mazarin, Louis liked the work of running a country and decided to do it himself, breaking with precedent and dispensing with a first minister. He had learned that his noble sycophants, such as the superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, were robbing him blind, and he embraced his kingly role with relish. Moreover, he desired that France be self-sufficient in various industries and became a fervent patron of French arts and culture, establishing royal academies of dance and letters and subsidizing the work of playwright Molière and composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Too much of Wilkinson’s plodding narrative details the romantic court intrigues, including Louis’ extramarital affairs with Louise de La Vallière and Madame de Montespan, and his happy late-life second marriage to the governess of the royal children, Madame de Maintenon. Sadly, the romance rarely sizzles, and the author doesn’t provide enough big-picture analysis of significant points in his subject’s life—e.g., his stoking of the War of Spanish Succession.
Wilkinson offers little in the way of passion or illumination to enliven this account of the dazzling reign of the Sun King.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-015-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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