Wilkinson offers little in the way of passion or illumination to enliven this account of the dazzling reign of the Sun King.
A new biography of “the most legendary king ever to sit on the throne of France.”
In this surprisingly dry treatment, British biographer Wilkinson (The Princes in the Tower: Did Richard III Murder His Nephews, Edward V & Richard of York?, 2015, etc.) focuses more on the king’s romantic entanglements than on his acts and legacy. For a staggering 72 years, Louis XIV (1638-1715) reigned over an efflorescent France, inheriting the throne at age 4 in 1643 and ruling until just shy of age 77 in 1715. Early on during his reign, he was under the wing of his regent mother, Anne, and influential minister Cardinal Mazarin, and he saw France through numerous costly wars with his European neighbors, conflicts that allowed the country to enjoy political predominance, key annexations, and a flourishing French culture. Schooled by the Jesuits and in the statecraft of the crafty Mazarin, Louis liked the work of running a country and decided to do it himself, breaking with precedent and dispensing with a first minister. He had learned that his noble sycophants, such as the superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, were robbing him blind, and he embraced his kingly role with relish. Moreover, he desired that France be self-sufficient in various industries and became a fervent patron of French arts and culture, establishing royal academies of dance and letters and subsidizing the work of playwright Molière and composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Too much of Wilkinson’s plodding narrative details the romantic court intrigues, including Louis’ extramarital affairs with Louise de La Vallière and Madame de Montespan, and his happy late-life second marriage to the governess of the royal children, Madame de Maintenon. Sadly, the romance rarely sizzles, and the author doesn’t provide enough big-picture analysis of significant points in his subject’s life—e.g., his stoking of the War of Spanish Succession.
Wilkinson offers little in the way of passion or illumination to enliven this account of the dazzling reign of the Sun King.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-015-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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