A masterful portrait, staggeringly complete and contradictory and fluently translated—a delight to read.
Wonderfully lyrical, historically nuanced exploration of the irruption of this Romantic hero.
In this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume biography of the “magician” who was Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), French scholar Gueniffey (Director of Studies/L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) places the patriot and dictator squarely at the center of unprecedented historical events—not for hagiographic purposes but for the sheer fascination of examining this self-willed character. In his first book in English translation, the author carefully delineates Napoleon's humble upbringing in Corsica to the declaration of Consulate for Life in 1802, from canny officer and negotiator for his extended family’s benefactors to single-minded workhorse and consolidator of centralized power. Throughout the book, Gueniffey allows the countless authors before him to range about the narrative—Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Taine, Emerson, Jacques Bainville and many more. For Gueniffey, there is an obvious joy to the historiographic journey. Having witnessed the excesses of the Revolution, Napoleon came down on the side of “law, tranquility and all the established authorities”; having pressed for Corsican emancipation, he and his family were banished in 1793. Marrying Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1796 was a way to establish French nationality that education could not afford him. His defeat of the British at Toulon set him on his course; as the author astutely observes, Napoleon was “born in war.” In search of a future, he worked tirelessly and imaginatively, often ill, and he was frugal, solitary and bourgeois. Across a consistently illuminating narrative, Gueniffey sifts his subject’s defining achievements of this period—e.g., concord with the Catholic Church (after the rupture of the Revolution) and establishment of a civil code, which confirmed his reputation as a legislator.
A masterful portrait, staggeringly complete and contradictory and fluently translated—a delight to read.Pub Date: April 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-36835-4
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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