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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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