by Andrea di Robilant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2008
Occasionally tedious, but the author’s meticulous attention to personal detail yields compelling historical character...
A well-composed but substance-thin tale of the author’s ancestor and the daughter of a great Venetian family.
Di Robilant (A Venetian Affair, 2003) departs from the venerable Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, once belonging to the family of the same name, now divided into private apartments, then moves into the story of the couple who commissioned the statue at the height of the Napoleonic empire. In 1787, teenaged Lucia Memmo, the first daughter of widower Andrea Memmo, a well-born Venetian ambassador, married the eligible bachelor Alvise Mocenigo and embarked on a long, rocky life as the wife of a rising diplomat. Overcoming her youthful bewilderment at living in the deluxe palazzo, depression after numerous miscarriages and her husband’s chronic womanizing, gambling and frequent absences, Lucia nonetheless made brilliant entry into the Hapsburg court in Vienna, where she was forced to stay to safeguard the pregnancy of her short-lived son. With the invasion of Napoleon in 1796 and the divvying up of Italy by France and Austria, Alvise was in the awkward position of aiding the capitulation of Venice to the French dictator. Alvise’s collaboration with the Bonapartists would lead to being ostracized socially, while Lucia’s affair with the occupying Austrian officer, Baron Maximilian Plunkett, created scandal and a love child brought up for years in secrecy. With Alvise appointed to Napoleon’s government in Novara, intrepid Lucia was enlisted as lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta in Milan. Lucia would serve as confidante of Empress Josephine, live for a year in Paris and later become landlady to Lord Byron, who lived for a time at Palazzo Mocenigo. Through letters and diaries, di Robilant reconstructs Lucia’s life around the tumultuous events of European history.
Occasionally tedious, but the author’s meticulous attention to personal detail yields compelling historical character sketches.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4413-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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