A briskly written account of a time when high fashion took death’s hand and danced.
Marie Antoinette’s extravagant sartorial style represented the height of French fashion in the 18th century, even as it provided her myriad enemies with symbols potent enough to help foment the monarchy’s overthrow.
Weber (French/Barnard Coll.) has written previously about the revolutionary period (Terror and Its Discontents, 2003, not reviewed), and her comprehensive, entertaining latest work suggests that she has studied just about every other important history—academic and popular—covering the reign of Louis XVI and his controversial consort. Although there is probably little new to say about this unhappy couple, their story will forever engage with its unparalleled combination of haute lifestyle and unspeakable violence. (Mercifully, the author keeps the king’s and queen’s executions offstage.) Weber focuses on Marie Antoinette’s clothing, emblematic of her sense of style, her outrageous expenditures and her tragic inability to comprehend the public’s perceptions of her and her excesses. Weber’s task is made difficult by two factors. First, virtually none of this clothing now exists, having been destroyed by angry mobs or stolen by souvenir-hunters. So we are left with contemporaneous written descriptions, portraits and parodies. Second, the story of the young queen’s rise and fall is so engrossing that Weber sometimes finds it hard to turn our attention away from history’s explosions to look at her subject’s latest ridiculous pouf or silk-and-satin extravagance. This ultimately serves, then, as yet another biography of Marie Antoinette, another history of the French Revolution. Still, the fashion segments are fun to read and researched with consummate attention to detail, as 80 pages of endnotes certify. When the royal couple is finally imprisoned, the author does a splendid job of explaining how their political fall was mirrored in their dress. Her account of the queen’s final appearance—all in glorious white—on the ride to the guillotine carries enormous poignancy.
A briskly written account of a time when high fashion took death’s hand and danced.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7949-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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