The book that I selected for my fourth nine weeks book blog book was Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser. I choose this book because Marie Antoinette was someone that I admire from European history. She was a great ruler and a loving mother. She has a bad rep for saying, “Let them eat cake.” This is entirely false, she said no such thing. What she did say was “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche". Brioche is a type of bread. Furthermore there is no clear evidence that she even uttered these words. The only place that it appears in is Rousseau book Confession, this book was a very inaccurate biography of her life.
Some of the things that I enjoyed about this book were the way that everything was layed out. It went in chronological order of her life, from birth to death. I also enjoyed that it cleared many misconceptions about the last queen of France. Many people think that she was a spoiled brat, but if you read about how her life really was, you would see that she was a victim of her own environment. I also enjoyed that the author not only talked about Marie Antoinette, but gave how her friends thought of her, and the other people around her, opinion. I also enjoyed how the pictures were incorporated into the book; it gave you an image to go by when you were reading her life story.
The thing that I disliked about the book was that it was very bland, there were some times throughout the book that the author seems interested and excited about some of the information, but at the same time there are places in the book that she seems to just drag on and on and on.
This book is one that I would recommend for my peers. Reasons being is that one it is an amazing book about an inspiring person. Second it clears the name of a historically significant person that was beheaded for all the wrong reasons. Also it really helps to know things about a person before you form an opinion on that person, and you should have something like a biography to obtain your information from.
This book has come rhetorical; a major rhetorical strategy is that of logos. Logos is an appeal to people with facts, and this book is nothing but facts about Marie Antoinette’s life. The author used very little imagery in her writing, but she did insert pictures which helped with the imagery issue. The diction that author used was very straight forward and formal. I feel that the author made it this way because being royal was a very formal thing, so she wanted to keep it in the scheme of things. The tone of this book was very plan and on the brink of boring, she was not one to try to be flamboyant with her word choice; she said it like it was. Fraser was well good at setting things up, she gave back stories and let you know everything that was happening. She was not very descriptive in her words though.
Word Count: 522
