An intelligent and entertaining biography of “the Empress whom France never forgot.”
A British historian’s capable account of Josephine Bonaparte (1763-1814) and her tumultuous relationship with the celebrated French general and political leader Napoleon.
Born in Martinique to a family of planters, Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie, whom Napoleon would later rename Josephine, dreamed of escaping to the colorful world her father, a former page at the court of Versailles, had told her awaited in Paris. The opportunity to leave for France came in the form of marriage to a wealthy but dissipated young seducer, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who ridiculed his new wife mercilessly for her “thick Creole accent and clumsy manner.” Only after de Beauharnais divorced her four years later did Josephine begin her transformation into one of the most desirable women of her age. Determined to find a place among the glittering French nobility, she became a courtesan; through a combination of political savvy and luck, she managed to survive the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath. Liaisons with important leaders eventually brought Josephine into contact with the hero of the French counterrevolution, Napoleon, who fell passionately in love with her. Against the wishes of the socially ambitious Bonaparte family, the pair married in 1796. For the next eight years, the balance of power between them favored Josephine, who took lovers while her husband gloried in his military conquests. But as the ungainly Napoleon grew more desirous to become the new European Caesar, that balance shifted decidedly in his favor. Josephine—who was unable to bear her husband a child—eventually found herself displaced by hordes of mistresses and eventually, a second empress, Marie-Louise of Austria. Yet, as Williams (Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch, 2010, etc.) ably shows, beneath the lust for power and prominence each shared, a remarkably durable passion bound them together to the end.
An intelligent and entertaining biography of “the Empress whom France never forgot.”Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0345522832
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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