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
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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