In a sharp and moving biography, Auricchio captures the essence of the “French hero of the American Revolution—the Hero of...
A new biography of the Marquis, as well as a serious study of the differences between two of the most important revolutions of the millennium.
Gilbert du Motier, aka Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), is one of America’s great Revolutionary heroes, but Auricchio (Adelaide Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, 2009) explains the mixed reviews he received during his homeland’s revolution. Though Lafayette was a member of the nobility, as a non-Parisian, he was not readily accepted at court—until he married Adrienne de Noailles, whose family not only opened doors, but also, by their untimely deaths, left him a very rich man. When he heard of the American struggle for freedom, he knew it was his destiny to assist. His wealth and ties to France’s government helped ensure his appointment to the staff of Gen. George Washington. The attachment between him and Washington is well-documented, with the Army’s leader tempering the zeal of the young hothead. The real enlightenment of the man begins with Lafayette’s role in the French Revolution. Here, Auricchio picks up the devotion of the young hero as he was expecting to return to the adulation of his countrymen. His moderation served only to defeat him; even his Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was considered too radical. At first, he was a calming factor, but neither the left nor the right accepted him; he was either too radical or too conservative. France was not a new country like America with a clean slate to build a radical new government; she relied on her traditions and royalty and rejected the idea of constitutional monarchy and, with it, Lafayette.
In a sharp and moving biography, Auricchio captures the essence of the “French hero of the American Revolution—the Hero of Two Worlds, the Apostle of Liberty.”Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0307267559
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
