Superbly rendered biography of a most significant man.
The astonishingly productive, creative, dangerous, revolutionary, mercenary, libertine life of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–1799), author of The Barber of Seville and financier for the American Revolution.
Condensed from the original three volumes published in France between 1999 and 2004, this edition presumably picks the juiciest fruit from a loaded tree. Born the son of a watchmaker, a trade he later followed and mastered, Beaumarchais ended his life in a fierce struggle with the leaders of the French Revolution, who several times nearly condemned him to the tireless national razor. With vast personal resources of energy and eclectic talents, he led a peripatetic life, rendering quite difficult, acknowledges Lever (Sade, 1993, etc.), the task of weaving its many strands into a single linear thread. But the author artfully succeeds from start to finish. During his early years as a watchmaker, Beaumarchais’ created a design that greatly improved the accuracy of timepieces. As a playwright, he composed two classic theater pieces later transformed by others into classic operas: The Barber and The Marriage of Figaro. (His third play about Figaro, the sentimental A Mother’s Guilt, earns only disdain from Lever.) As a businessman and investor, Beaumarchais amassed a great fortune, then saw most of it vanish during the Terror. As a politician, he finessed royalty and revolutionaries alike, miraculously escaping death after a number of official denunciations. He married several times but also maintained some quite athletic extramarital activities. Lever quotes a letter in which Beaumarchais recalls to one mistress, with pure locker-room candor, some of their more adventurous sexual escapades. He helped fund the American Revolution (though his heirs spent many years applying for reimbursement); he was fascinated with the Panama Canal plans; and he tried to sell his mansion to young Napoleon Bonaparte. He seems in all ways a more gifted and assiduous Zelig.
Superbly rendered biography of a most significant man.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-11328-5
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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