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Book Review: The Beggar and the Professor
The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)
I have a love/hate relationship with this book. On the one hand, it has lots of great details in it like when Felix (the son) travels with his father to visit the old family farm in the Alps to show the relatives just how good they've made it. On the last leg of the journey, he wears a red silk doublet, red pantaloons and a fuzzy velvet hat. He also gets heatstroke because he's hiking up a mountain in summer in red silk!
Or the stories about the students in Thomas's school, or the baker who died in a fire because he was too fat to escape out his house windows... Or that there was a fashion for yellow dresses in Basel brought from Strausburg by a particular person. Or details about the practical jokes they used to play on each other. Or the business and legal aspects, or training in being a doctor, childhood, etc.
It just has lots of great stuff, rich detail and soap opera-y true life stories to keep you entertained for a while. It shows what life was really like in Switzerland and other parts of Europe in the early to mid 16th century, for both rich and poor. Thomas the father started out as a goat herd, traveled around Europe for ten years trying to learn to read and he ended up a professor and a printer (along with several other careers along the way)
On the other hand, the author drives me crazy with his sideline editorializing and his failure to just quote the raw material straight up. He paraphrases most everything and the scholar in me wants the straight text.
Bottom line: Buy it. Its cheap, entertaining and has lots of real life details that will help you flesh out your persona whether male or female.
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator) I have a love/hate relationship with this book. On the one hand, it has lots of great details in it like when Felix (the son) travels with his father to visit the old family farm in the Alps to show the relatives just how good they've made it. On the last leg of the journey, he wears a red silk doublet, red pantaloons and a fuzzy velvet hat. He also gets heatstroke because he's hiking up a mountain in summer in red silk!
Or the stories about the students in Thomas's school, or the baker who died in a fire because he was too fat to escape out his house windows... Or that there was a fashion for yellow dresses in Basel brought from Strausburg by a particular person. Or details about the practical jokes they used to play on each other. Or the business and legal aspects, or training in being a doctor, childhood, etc.
It just has lots of great stuff, rich detail and soap opera-y true life stories to keep you entertained for a while. It shows what life was really like in Switzerland and other parts of Europe in the early to mid 16th century, for both rich and poor. Thomas the father started out as a goat herd, traveled around Europe for ten years trying to learn to read and he ended up a professor and a printer (along with several other careers along the way)
On the other hand, the author drives me crazy with his sideline editorializing and his failure to just quote the raw material straight up. He paraphrases most everything and the scholar in me wants the straight text.
Bottom line: Buy it. Its cheap, entertaining and has lots of real life details that will help you flesh out your persona whether male or female.