Timely, but disappointingly superficial.
A breathless account of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798.
Napoleon was attempting to get a head start in Europe’s frantic imperial scramble to carve up the rest of the world, writes Burleigh (The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian, 2003, etc.). But he tried to lend France’s military bid a certain moral authority by bringing with him scientists and artists to help administer the new empire. They were there not just to conquer, but to civilize. Napoleon’s scholars unearthed hugely important antiquities, most famously the Rosetta Stone. Engineers created maps and explored Egyptian waterways. Doctors tried to keep French soldiers healthy and wrote condescending reports about Egyptian “folk medicine.” Magazine writer Burleigh intriguingly comments on the cultural impact that the “discovery” of Egypt had on French decorative arts and fashion, for example the creation in 1804 of a porcelain dinner service decorated with pyramids and Sphinxes. She doffs her hat at “Orientalism,” but her discussion of the colonial fantasies that animated it is shallow and her analysis overly simplistic. “When the French arrived, various European-style vendors [of tobacco and wine] suddenly appeared,” she writes, not bothering to consider the history of economic negotiation and cultural exchange that might well account for such speedy commercial enterprise. She drops intriguing hints about French attitudes toward “disposable” Egyptian women—after an outbreak of plague, for example, officials in Cairo ordered the drowning of all prostitutes “found having relations with a Frenchman” as a means of protecting the Europeans—but here too fails to fully explore the stories her sources prompt her to tell.
Timely, but disappointingly superficial.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-059767-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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 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
© Copyright 2025 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.
