Napoleon’s recalcitrant, republican younger brother has his say in this lively reconstruction of the Bonaparte family’s accession to power.
Simonetta (The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded, 2008) and Arikha (Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, 2007) acquired unpublished correspondence and notebooks belonging to Lucien Bonaparte and his wife, Alexandrine, that were spared the purge by Napoleon III’s revisionists. Much of their work here revisits Lucien’s Memoirs, with expurgated passages restored involving telling scenes between the brothers as well as details about Lucien’s relationship with Alexandrine, his lovely second wife who was vilified by Napoleon mostly because the First Consul wanted his brother to make an astute political match rather than marry for love. The authors “take [Lucien] at his word,” allowing the dialogue he recorded seemingly verbatim to remain intact and jump off the page—namely, when Napoleon informs his brothers Joseph and Lucien while reclining in the bathtub of his precipitous decision to sell the vast Louisiana territories to the Americans, the same territory Lucien had skillfully and very recently negotiated from the Spanish. Napoleon had often been away in military school during Lucien’s youth, and the relationship between them was respectful but never warm. Lucien had studied in seminary before becoming a political activist and speaker; he was deeply imbued with republican ideals and early on expressed his suspicions about his older brother’s despotic ambitions. If Napoleon were king, Lucien wrote to Joseph, “his name would be a terror to posterity and to sensitive patriots.” Nonetheless, Napoleon relied on Lucien’s diplomacy and cool-headedness to help stage his coup amid the Council of the Five Hundred in November 1799, and used him as a diplomatic tool until Lucien’s forced exile over his marriage to Alexandrine. A fresh piece of turbulent French history.
Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-11156-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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