A massively ambitious compilation of history and stuff that will appeal to students of Napoleon and art history buffs but...
Voluminous chronicle of Napoleon’s fanaticism about Roman antiquity and an ample catalog of his empire’s acquisitions.
A journalist specializing in art and docent at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Jaques (The Empress of Art: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia, 2016, etc.) evidently has the eye and relish for the objet d’art, as she gives exhaustive treatment to Napoleon’s studied appropriation of Roman imperial ritual, style, and trappings. His mythomania compelled him to dizzying heights of cultural plunder and enrichment. His conquering model was, of course, Caesar (and before him, Alexander the Great), whose triumphal processions through Rome bearing priceless booty from vanquished lands Napoleon re-enacted through the festooned streets of Paris once he consolidated power. Masterpieces seized during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns, unceremoniously ripped from temples, galleries, and altars, were relocated to Paris and displayed ceremonially for public “morale and patriotism,” since France alone was the civilized heir to the ancient civilizations. Jaques moves chronologically over 15 years, from Napoleon’s Consulate to Imperium and attempted dynasty, to record the systematic construction of his “New Rome” in Paris. He employed the work of artist Vivant Denon and designers Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, among others, to set the neoclassical tone at his court and palaces like Malmaison and Saint-Cloud. As Jaques amply shows, the empire’s style was defined by Greek and Roman motifs in furniture, medallions, and jewelry; short hairstyles; and modest gowns in expensive French textiles. Meanwhile, Italian sculptor Antonio Canova created canonical neoclassical works like Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker. Framed by the historical context, the author’s accretion of detail both impresses and becomes tiresome, spilling over into grand schemes of architecture like the Arc de Triomphe and Madeleine Church, Hadrian columns and Egyptian obelisks, and aqueduct systems modeled on Rome.
A massively ambitious compilation of history and stuff that will appeal to students of Napoleon and art history buffs but overwhelm general readers.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-869-3
Page Count: 574
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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