An acutely sensitive group portrait of the women who basked in the Sun King’s reflected glory.
Altogether at ease with the mores of the ancien régime, Fraser (Marie Antoinette, 2001, etc.) eschews a detailed biography of Louis XIV to focus instead on the women who shaped and were shaped by France’s most glorious ruler.
He was king for 72 years, time enough to build Versailles, wage numerous, mostly unsuccessful, wars and accumulate a rich history with the opposite sex. Louis’s mother, Queen Anne, gave birth at 36—a then-astoundingly late stage in life for pregnancy—lending an immediate air of the miraculous to the future monarch. Anne established an unusually close relationship with her son, who never entirely erased from his mind her mixture of beauty and piety as a template of female perfection. Louis abandoned his teenage liaison with the unsuitable Marie Mancini to marry Spanish Infanta Maria Teresa. As Queen Marie-Thérèse, she accommodated two important mistresses, Louise de La Vallière and the Marquise de Montespan, and drew from Louis the final tribute that she gave him no trouble except by dying. After Marie-Thérèse, he secretly married Madame de Maintenon, whose demeanor was remarkably like that of his mother. Fraser paints each of these women in full and offers sketches of a succession of minor mistresses, one night stands, sisters-in-law (including the hilariously vulgar and bitchy wife of Louis’s homosexual brother), princesses and even an exiled foreign queen, all of whom engaged the king’s genuine interest. To help keep track of this large cast, the profusion of changing titles and the dizzying succession of bastards, the author provides a useful guide to the principal characters. Courtiers meticulously charted the king’s amorous adventures, and Fraser excels at reproducing the hothouse atmosphere in which the monarch’s raised eyebrow might portend a serious change in someone’s fortune. Uncomfortably aware of the Church’s opposition to his notorious love life, Louis fully indulged himself during his heyday before turning in old age to a greater concern for his salvation.
An acutely sensitive group portrait of the women who basked in the Sun King’s reflected glory.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-50984-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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