The run-up to the French Revolution in expert hands.
A page-turner on the 40 years before the fall of the Bastille.
The kings during this period were Louis XV and his grandson, Louis XVI, absolute monarchs whose rule was far from absolute, writes veteran historian Darnton, recipient of the National Humanities Medal and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Despite an oppressive police force, Paris citizenry remained touchy, often disrespectful, and sometimes violent. Royal power also faced resistance from the Parlement, which was not a legislative body but an assembly that oversaw the courts and legal system. A law wasn’t official until Parlement published it, and it regularly used this power to express disagreement. Inevitably, wars dominated these decades. Following the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War was a disaster; victory supporting the American colonies seemed satisfying revenge over Britain but swelled an already massive debt. Wars are expensive, and since the church and aristocracy paid no taxes, they weighed heavily on the poor. Throughout this prodigiously researched narrative, Darnton concentrates on scandal and royal infighting, a reasonable tactic because kings preferred to leave the boring details of governing to underlings. The author accomplishes the impressive feat of bringing to vivid life these men, largely unknown to American readers, who were preoccupied with raising money. Reforms to require the church and aristocracy to contribute always failed, but borrowing was easy, so that’s what they did until 1787, when investors refused to subscribe to the latest loan. Declaring “partial bankruptcy,” officials cut interest payments, mostly to annuities that provided income to average citizens. This “produced outrage and panic” that was not relieved with news that the king would summon the Estates General, an ancient advisory body last called in 1614, which would, in theory, establish a constitution, reform the tax system, and regenerate France. It met two years later, and Darnton capably chronicles what followed, but riots and mass murder were already well under way.
The run-up to the French Revolution in expert hands.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781324035589
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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