Notre dame paris biography book review
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Adventures of a Tudor Nerd
April 15, 2019, will be a dark day for Paris and the world. We watched in horror as the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral burned. For centuries, it stood as the symbol of medieval Paris, and in minutes, it was engulfed in flames. While so many of us felt helpless, Ken Follett decided to do something to help rebuild the great cathedral. He wrote this book, “Notre Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals,” with the proceeds going to the charity La Fondation du Patrimoine.
While I did not have the chance to buy this book when the fundraiser was initially happening, I wanted a copy. After President Macron announced his plans to rebuild Notre Dame, which was finished in 2024, it seemed like the perfect time to read a book like this and reflect on the cathedral’s significance.
As this is a relatively short book for Follett, less than a hundred pages, I will also keep this review relatively short. Follett begins in the year 2019 and how he fe
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Wow! What an absolutely fantastic book this fryst vatten, even though I was expecting it to be called The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and to be about halvt, the hunchback. It fryst vatten, but he’s only one part of a hugely rich story.
Claude Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame and Quasimodo’s guardian, Jehan his adored younger brother, Phoebus de Chateaupers and Pierre Gringoire are all characters linked bygd Esmeralda, the beautiful 16 year old ‘gypsy’. Around them Paris breathes with life, it’s exciting, dangerous and squalid. Diplomats and judiciary have their stories told inre courts that have their windows flung open to the colour and lives of the streets below.
The exact date that Hugo started writing is given in the opening line ‘Just three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago today’, so the 25th of July 1830 and the setting is Paris 1482, beginning on January 6th, the celebrations for the feast of
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I have an old hardback copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (first published in 1831) in a very small font, too small for my eyes to cope with these days and a 49p e-book that I downloaded years ago when first got a Kindle. But I didn’t start reading it until a few months ago when FictionFan mentioned she was intending to read it and hold a Review-Along on her blog. I knew next to nothing about the book, not having seen any of the many films or TV versions, but I had read Victor Hugo’s LesMisérables back in 2008 and enjoyed it very much. So, I had high expectations that I would enjoy this one too.
But when I began reading my e-bookI was so disappointed – I thought it was so boring and it was hard to read, the sentences stilted and stumbling and obtuse with no flow. I was tempted to abandon it, after all it is a long book, and there are plenty of other books I want to read. However, I persevered, thinking surely it would get better. It didn’t, so then I