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
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
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