An engrossing history of the travels of a notorious manuscript across nations and centuries.
The Marquis de Sade is a name that would light up any literary history; this one focuses on the life of his most famous manuscript.
In 1785, Donatien Alphonse François (1740-1814), aka the Marquis de Sade, wrote 120 Days of Sodom, composing the manuscript in tiny handwriting on a scroll of 157,000 words while incarcerated atop the Liberty Tower at the Bastille. In it, “four wealthy degenerates” conduct a four-month orgy with 32 subordinates, and their perversions only escalate in their depravity and horror. De Sade's name would become synonymous with sexual pleasure through pain, and this story of his growing reputation through the years explains why. Though journalist Warner looks at the development of "bibliophilia's most shadowy realm: the world of erotic books,” his primary focus is on the journey of the 120 Days manuscript through its many owners, court battles, a brazen theft, its place at the center of "the largest Ponzi scheme in French history,” and its eventual acquisition by the French government for 4.5 million euros. Warner tells this history in alternating chapters devoted to the life of de Sade, the peripatetic journeys of the 120 Days scroll, and its role as a prized commodity among bibliophiles. The result is an occasionally confusing chronology that jumps back and forth among the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, but the author provides several valuable maps and a cast of characters at the beginning of the book, which help orient readers. Ultimately, the narrative’s greatest scandal is not the licentious behavior of de Sade, whom the surrealists dubbed the "freest spirit who ever lived,” nor the literary stature of his transgressive works but rather the sheer dimension of the investment fraud, a “decade-long, continent-spanning, billion-euro con,” in which the scroll played a central role. As Warner demonstrates, de Sade’s depravity pales in comparison to the gyrations of financial tycoons who sought to capitalize on his most monumental work.
An engrossing history of the travels of a notorious manuscript across nations and centuries.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593135686
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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