Reviewed Elsewhere
- Reviewed Elsewhere
Contributing reviewers Nell Altizer, Patricia Angley, Alana Bell, Janet Butler, Michael Fassiotto, Marie-Christine Garneau, Douglas Hilt, Noel Kent, Barbara Bennett Peterson, Forrest R. Pitts, and Yvonne Ward provided the excerpts for this issue.
Publications reviewed include The Age (Melbourne), American Quarterly, Australian Book Review, Australian Historical Studies, (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Guardian Weekly, History Australia, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Australian Studies, Journal of World History, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books (NYRB), New York Times Book Review (NYTBR), Opera News, Studi Francesi, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Washington Post National Weekly Edition (WP), and the Women’s Review of Books.
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence. Michael Holzman. Amherst: U of Massachussetts P, 2009. 399 pp. $29.95.
“Holzman’s brisk, uncluttered book offers valuable access to previously untapped material on Angleton, who became the first head of the Counterintelligence Staff of the CIA,” and makes “incisive use of his years as a student of English at Yale and the influence on him of the New Critics and modernist poets of his day.”
Terence Hawkes. TLS, June 12, 2009: 3–5.
Mémoires of Robert Arnaud d’Andilly, with Mémoires of Antoine Arnaud d’Andilly. Ed. Régine Pouzet. Paris: Champion, 2008. 697 pp. Euro110.
Interestingly juxtaposed in this unique volume are two completely different memoirs, although they were written during the same period and by members of the same family. On the one hand, the Memoirs of Robert Arnaud d’Andilly, translator of Theresa and Augustine and humble gardener at Port-Royal des Champs, illustrate the famous eloquence of Port-Royal and Jansenism. On the other hand, the reconstruction of the past in the Memoirs written ten years later by his son, Antoine, relies mostly on particular details or vivid anecdotes such as his noteworthy trip to Italy. The editor of this volume, Régine Pouzet, who is also the author of Chronique des Pascal in which she demonstrated “an impressive erudition” on Port-Royal, provides [End Page 876] the reader with the exhaustive philological and critical apparatuses necessary to grasp the historical value of these two different testimonies.
Benedetta Papasogli. Studi Francesi, Jan.–Apr. 2009: 167–68.
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la vie d’Agrippa d’Aubigné. Ed. Gilles Banderier. Paris: Champion, 2008. 117 pp. Euro39.
Madame de Maintenon was obsessed with how society continually contested her nobility. She therefore requested that the biography of her grandfather, the Huguenot Agrippa d’Aubigné, be written. Though unpublished until now, this biography is actually the first one ever written on d’Aubigné, and thus contributes to the elaboration of his myth. Written after the revocation of the Edit de Nantes by a Catholic, La Chapelle, this biography praises D’Aubigné’s public qualities as a soldier, courtier, and faithful servant of the Bourbon monarchy, qualities that D’Aubigné had himself exalted himself in his L’Histoire universelle.
Michele Mastroianni. Studi Francesi, Jan.–Apr. 2009: 158.
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon. Veronica Buckley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. 498 pp. $35.00.
Buckley “offers a lively, sympathetic portrayal of the woman who, against all odds, succeeded in taming the royal tomcat.”
Caroline Weber. NYTBR, Sept. 6, 2009: 8.
Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. William McCarthy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. 725 pp. $60.00.
This is a biography of the eighteenth century Englishwoman who “revolutionized the culture of childhood.” “McCarthy recovers the tough-minded contrarian . . . and in true Enlightenment spirit engages us in a conversation with her. Like all good historical biographers, he has one eye on his own times.” The woman “we meet in this richly mediated study is a passionately political Anna Barbauld whose concerns speak directly to issues that vex us today.”
Norma Clarke. TLS, May 29, 2009: 8.
Mattia Battistini: King of Baritones and Baritone of Kings. Jacques Chuilon. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009. 456 pp. $85.00.
“The most effective advocate for...
