Flaubert’s writing is vitally important to anyone seeking to understand the history of the period, and Brooks provides a...
Detailed examination of Gustave Flaubert’s historical novel Sentimental Education (1869) and how it may have prophesied the “terrible year” of 1871.
At least that is what Flaubert claimed as he walked through the ruins of Paris: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, collapse of the French Army, defeat of Napoleon III, the Siege of Paris, and civil war could have been prevented had only people read his book. Brooks (Comparative Literature/Princeton Univ.; Enigmas of Identity, 2011, etc.) provides a long summary of Sentimental Education, which he admits might try readers’ patience. His professorial tone and deep diagnosis of Flaubert’s style will reawaken one’s sense of being a student trying to comprehend a profound university teacher, and the book will require some rereading to fully comprehend some of Brooks’ insights. Nonetheless, he keeps the narrative moving. Flaubert’s friendship with George Sand and their correspondence give a good indication of his attempts and intentions to convey the history of his contemporaries in 1848 that he felt was just a dress rehearsal for 1870. The history of France in this period is vital to understanding Flaubert’s work, and Brooks presents a thorough picture of the lessons of the revolution as farce and the significance of class conflict. The terrible year was bad enough with the loss to Prussia and their siege of Paris, but the civil war and the folly of the Paris Commune resulted in horrendous atrocities and devastation. “It was a year of almost unimaginable suffering, defeat, humiliation, hatred, and fratricidal conflict,” writes Brooks, “a year when war and surrender were followed by siege, cold, hunger, then class warfare on a scale never seen before.” Flaubert claimed that Sentimental Education showed how most of the suffering was caused by ignorance and the immense human capacity for self-deception.
Flaubert’s writing is vitally important to anyone seeking to understand the history of the period, and Brooks provides a scholarly but not inaccessible entry point.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09602-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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