An entertaining, well-researched work that will particularly interest students of cultural history and the French Revolution.
A scholarly debut biography that looks at the French Revolution through the eyes of the queen’s hairdresser and confidant.
When Léonard Autié first arrived as a young man in Paris in 1769, he was so short on money that he walked the last 120 miles on foot. His possessions consisted of little more than a few coins, a tortoiseshell comb and “an ample supply of confidence.” Ten years later, after he created the famous “pouf” hairstyle, he was the hairdresser to the queen of France. A decade after that, during the revolution, Autié “took on the dangerous role of messenger and secret liaison between the royal family and their supporters.” Later, forced into exile and financially ruined, he spent a lengthy sojourn in Russia, where he worked as hairdresser to the nobility (and even arranged the hair of Czar Paul I’s corpse). He was eventually allowed to return to Paris in 1814, and he died there six years later. Bashor draws on contemporary accounts and letters and particularly Autié’s ghostwritten memoir, purportedly based on his journals and published 18 years after his death. The author notes that the latter source’s dialogue is unverifiable (although he cross-checks it with contemporary sources whenever possible) and that Autié was given to boasting and exaggeration. Fortunately, however, Bashor liberally quotes from the Souvenirs de Léonard, giving his own account a gossipy, entertaining directness, similar to a historical novel. (He also includes a bibliography, endnotes and an index.) Autié’s perspective highlights just how out of touch and frivolous the aristocrats were; for example, when he brings news to Versailles of the fall of the Bastille, he finds the court ladies “oblivious” and “clamoring for his services.” Bashor doesn’t clearly explain the specifics of hair powdering and wig making or how Autié arranged his fantastic poufs (although he does include illustrations), but his depiction of Autié’s fascinating fly-on-the-wall role as confidant to doomed royalty makes up for it. Overall, he delivers an informative examination of a little-known player on a great stage.
An entertaining, well-researched work that will particularly interest students of cultural history and the French Revolution.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0762791538
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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