A sharp, compassionate literary biography.
A welcome reassessment of the life of Sophia Tolstoy (1844–1919), the misunderstood wife of the renowned Russian author.
From the age of 18, when she married the much-older Leo Tolstoy, Sophia’s energy was wholly devoted to her husband, whom she had loved since childhood. She was the inspiration for many of his most accomplished literary characters, his “muse, assistant, and first reader.” She managed the household and raised 13 children, and she was his publisher and her family’s financial provider in later years. None of this was easy. Tolstoy was a man of strong opinions and a quick temper, and after the publication of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he abruptly renounced all things material, including education, and turned against the church. This decision was not only unpractical in a household filled with children who were raised to love the arts and society, but also offensive to Sophia, whose faith was unshakable. Tolstoy remained moody and inconsistent for the rest of his life, turning from the kind and tender man she fell in love with to an incorrigible, sometimes cruel husband. As his beliefs and writings grew more political, a horde of devout “Tolstoyans” were a constant presence, creating a heartbreaking distance between the formerly inseparable couple. One particular disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, successfully turned Tolstoy against Sophia at the end of his life, and perpetrated a series of slanderous statements about her in the press and in later biographies of Tolstoy. “To portray Tolstoy as a martyr,” writes Popoff, “necessitated making Sophia evil.” As a result, for the last century Sophia’s name has been maligned, and her important contributions to Tolstoy’s legacy—especially her careful preparation of his archive—have been forgotten. Throughout their long and turbulent marriage, she and Tolstoy corresponded through ardent letters; she also penned an unpublished memoir. Popoff, a Russian journalist and scholar, uses her exclusive access to this material to compose a stunning new account of Sophia’s selfless life as a wife, mother, businesswoman, physician and intellectual, finally presenting this remarkable woman in a truthful light.
A sharp, compassionate literary biography.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9759-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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