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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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