Artfully observed, the bawdy and political wiles—for better and worse—of Madame de Pompadour. (8 pp. color illustrations)
Though bodices are ripped at the outset, French historian and biographer Lever (Marie Antoinette, not reviewed) settles down to offer an astute portrait of Madame de Pompadour in the court of Louis XV.
It was no mean feat for the parvenu Madame Le Normant d’Etiolles to become the “favorite” of Louis XV, the recognized mistress to the king. She had wealth—and a husband and child, for that matter—but she was no aristocrat. Louis’s ministers were wary, the court frowned, yet she was just the breath of fresh air the king needed, someone who was sensual enough to match his cravings, who tended his melancholia and kept him amused, who respected the Queen and the court’s way of doing things. Lever sings her charms from the start: “flawless white teeth and dimpled cheeks . . . the bewitching, tender, insistent gaze of her gray eyes, which burned at times with an incandescent light.” She also had brains and poise, learning the nuances of court etiquette, finding her way through the tangle of rites and intrigues. Louis admired her joie de vivre, and soon found he desired her mediation when granting favors as well. Gradually, Lever explains, Madame de Pompadour lost her role as lover but emerged as a power in the political sphere because she kept Louis’s favor. Despite Lever’s feeling that her initiatives were “motivated as much by her love for the monarch as by her resentment for personal enemies,” her influence with Louis was felt keenly in the wars with England and Prussia, the conflict between Parliament and the clergy, and negotiations with the pope. Lever details why Madame de Pompadour was never a favorite with the common folk, whose resentments ran the gamut from the gifts lavished on her to her association with French military defeats and woeful treaties.
Artfully observed, the bawdy and political wiles—for better and worse—of Madame de Pompadour. (8 pp. color illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-11308-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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