Meticulously detailed yet disappointing biography of the French activist/art authority/novelist/politician who began his career by trying to smuggle Khmer sculptures out of Indochina and ended up as minister of culture under de Gaulle's Fifth Republic. In the intervening years, Malraux helped establish an anticolonialist newspaper in Saigon, got to know the Communist cadre in China (about whom he wrote in his novel Man's Fate), led an air squadron during the Spanish Civil War (the source of Man's Hope), and was an important member of the French Maquis during WW II. Plenty of colorful raw material, then, but despite his piling up of facts, Murphy, a former staff member of The Economist, is unable to bring his protagonist to life. Part of the problem seems to lie in Malraux's character itself. Cold, egocentric, domineering, he refused to let the outside world penetrate beneath his chilly facade. Even the four major women in his life—Claire, his first wife; Josette, who bore him two sons out of wedlock; Madeleine, his brother's widow, whom he married after the war; and Louise de Vilmorin, his aristocratic mistress during his final years—seem to have been held at arm's distance. The closest Malraux appears to have come to a deep emotional involvement was with de Gaulle. Ironically, it was this attachment that led to Malraux's being vilified as a reactionary during the student riots of 1968. Murphy does provide some interesting insights, however: His analysis of Malraux's growing disillusionment with the Communist cause during the Spanish Civil War is sensitive and convincing, and an anecdote concerning the French minister's being invited to Washington to consult with US officials before Richard Nixon's first trip to China is intriguing (Henry Kissinger found Malraux's opinions hopelessly out-of-date). Heavy on the whos, whats, whens, and wheres; much too light on the whys. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1033-9
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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