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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
