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 Throughout their long and turbulent marriage, she and Tolstoy corresponded through ardent letters; she also penned an unpublished memoir.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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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