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THE ROSE OF MARTINIQUE

Name: THE ROSE OF MARTINIQUE
Author: Andrea Stuart
ISBN: 0-8021-1770-8

A LIFE OF NAPOLEON’S JOSEPHINE

by Andrea Stuart ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2004

Unfailingly interesting: a sturdy life of a woman often overlooked in the vast library of Napoleonic studies.

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A sometimes florid but engaging life of Napoleon’s true love, a woman ill served by circumstances.

Marie-Josèphe-Rose-Claire des Vergers de Tascher de la Pagarie was born on a plantation in Martinique, “a complicated place during a tumultuous time,” a voluptuous island that had just narrowly escaped becoming a British possession: “In a treaty concluded with Britain in 1763, when presented with the choice of holding on to Canada . . . or to the commercially and strategically important ‘sugar islands’ . . . the French chose the latter,” writes Critical Quarterly fiction editor Stuart (Showgirls, not reviewed). The French decision was fateful, for it kept Martiniquaise society well within Paris’s orbit; thus it was that young Rose came to France, “plump, provincial, and adolescent,” intended for the nobleman Alexandre de Beauharnais, whom students of French literature remember as the model for Valmont in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons. It wasn’t a happy marriage, writes Stuart, but it brought Rose into the best circles of aristocratic Paris, a dangerous place to be in revolutionary times—“it is hard to imagine that she escaped the profound disturbances which beset her contemporaries, many of whom reported a litany of psychological and physical disorders including nightmares, sleeplessness, anxiety and depression,” Stuart writes—but a good place to be noticed. Notice her Napoleon Bonaparte, himself an island-born outsider, did, and Stuart writes lucidly of their seemingly improbable romance, improbable, perhaps, because the young woman whom Napoleon would call Josephine had become a beauty, whereas Napoleon was a “small, sickly man” who was, a contemporary said, “given to inappropriate outbursts of laughter which did little to endear him to others.” Romance became partnership, and Stuart credits Rose/Josephine for her enlightened influence over the dictator, who famously divorced her while in exile on Elba for her inability to produce an heir to the throne.

Unfailingly interesting: a sturdy life of a woman often overlooked in the vast library of Napoleonic studies.

Pub Date: April 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-8021-1770-8

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.