A well-researched, crisply written, and entertaining story of family, greed, wealth, and the complex relations among them.
A juicy chronicle of France’s richest scandal.
As the daughter of L’Oréal founder Eugène Schueller, Liliane Bettencourt (b. 1922) is the wealthiest woman in the world—wealthy enough, in fact, to have lost nearly 25 million euros in Bernie Madoff’s scheme. While former Time Paris bureau chief Sancton (Song for My Fathers, 2010, etc.) tells the story of Bettencourt’s daughter’s suit against Liliane’s dear friend François-Marie Banier, he also provides an eye-opening look into the French judicial system. Based on Napoleonic code, it is a system that seems made to delay final decisions as cases wend their ways through the different court systems. Françoise Meyers brought the case against Banier for abus de faiblesse, or exploitation of weakness, in 2007, just after the onset of Liliane’s mental confusion. Françoise was a talented author and musician but never pleased Liliane. Her mother, nearly deaf, enjoyed Banier’s company and was uncharacteristically generous to him. She financed his artistic activities and gave him real estate and financial contracts for millions, not to mention the occasional check for 100,000 or 200,000 euros. Her gifts were extremely lavish, by some estimates totaling over 1 billion euros, considerable for a woman well known as a penny pincher. Banier was already a successful artist and photographer when he met Liliane, but he was also an abused child always searching for a replacement mother. What he gave her was liberation from the formal life she led. He was handsome, quirky, and a great conversationalist. Her husband, André, was warned about her gifts, but he decreed that it was her money to do with as she pleased, a stance that echoed the attitudes of her financial advisers and notary at first. André served in successive governments, due for the most part not to talent but to small brown envelopes handed to candidates.
A well-researched, crisply written, and entertaining story of family, greed, wealth, and the complex relations among them.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98447-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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