An impressive, comprehensive biography of the Sun King—a must-add to any Francophile’s library.
A wonderfully meticulous look at Louis XIV (1638-1715) from a leading historian of France.
“Even by royal standards,” writes Mansel (Aleppo: The Rise and Fall of Syria’s Greatest Merchant City, 2016, etc.), “the family into which the future Louis XIV was born…was a nest of vipers.” He ascended to the throne at age 4, and during more than three decades of the king’s 72-year reign, France was at war. Louis nurtured a lifelong fascination with the army and fighting as well as dancing. After the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, Jean-Baptiste Colbert became Louis’ minister and proved to be one of the ablest in the history of France. He economized, kept accurate accounts, reformed taxes, and introduced a new code of law while expanding trade and France’s colonies. “Louis was a man in pursuit of glory,” writes the author, “a king devoted to dynastic aggrandizement and a leader bent on national expansion.” He introduced a postal system, street lights, and boulevards. His finest creation, of course, was Versailles, to which Mansel, who displays an expansive knowledge of French history, devotes significant attention. Louis controlled every aspect of construction and effectively deserted Paris in its favor. He was famously a micromanager, particularly in wartime, though he lacked the talent of diplomacy and often listened to poor advice. France was involved in wars on all sides, fighting to expand her borders at the Rhine, drawing away imperial forces from the Ottomans, invading the Netherlands, and trying to infiltrate the Spanish throne. Louis also fiddled in English politics, accepting James II in exile and supporting invasions. He used the Stuarts to try to break up Scotland, Ireland, and England and forestall his nemesis, William of Orange. Louis’ revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought about a devastating diaspora, which was only slightly offset by the influx of Jacobites into France. Throughout, the narrative is dense but readable, and the 110-page notes and bibliography section attests to Mansel’s prodigious research.
An impressive, comprehensive biography of the Sun King—a must-add to any Francophile’s library.Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-226-69089-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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 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
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