A portrait of Voltaire, from late youth to his middle years-and not as a "toothless old man in a rage", is based on some new, revealing correspondence, and shaped- as one might expect- by Miss Mitford's taste for an era of intellectual distinction and worldly elegance. However, Voltaire, in his own words- or Miss Mitford's, is never really a lover. The long (16) years of his relationship with Emilie, Madame du Chatelet, begin with a mutuality of intellectual interests as they pursue their "amours philosophiques", thin out into the dependence of habit. Emilie, certainly a more passionate creature than Voltaire, always retains her proprietary interest and sometimes selfish control over him-while indulging in other affairs. Voltaire spends a great deal of his emotional energies in endless, ill-natured literary wrangles-and is seduced away from Emilie by the patronage of Frederick of Prussia. Toward the close of the long attachment, he finds himself an "old, ill man", too old for love- with Emilie- but susceptible to his young, widowed niece. And Emilie, the victim of her rather ridiculously headlong attraction to a new lover- becomes pregnant and dies at 44..... If Miss Mitford keeps her distance- and the reader's- from those engaged in all this fond, foolish philandering- she is always a civilized commentator and adds polish and irony to this age of reason.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1957
ISBN: 1590175786
Page Count: 340
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1957
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD
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
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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