A deeply researched, informative literary biography.
A fresh look at a spirited woman who played a significant role in literary history.
Kaufman, a scholar of Slavic languages and literature, especially Russian, creates a sympathetic portrait of Anna Snitkina (1846-1918), who married Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1867 and kept his legacy alive until her death. Drawing on letters, Anna’s diaries (including her secret diary from the turbulent first year of their marriage), memoir, and others’ recollections of her, Kaufman contextualizes his subject’s life in a period of roiling social and political unrest, including the rise of Russia’s first feminist movement. Anna was a “tangle of contradictions.” She was “a social progressive with conservative values, a Russian patriot who happened to be half Swedish, a serious student prone to infectious laughter, a decisive young woman with nerves of steel who nevertheless suffered bouts of mania, a pragmatist and a mystic.” Hired to be Dostoevsky’s stenographer, she came to the job already enamored of the novelist’s characters; when Dostoevsky proposed, she readily accepted. During their 14-year marriage, Anna bore the burden of her husband’s narcissism, misogyny, and infidelity; the “destructive mania” of his gambling addiction; his unpredictable epileptic seizures; and the deaths of two of their four children. Their finances were so precarious that they frequently had to pawn their possessions. At times, Anna pushed him to gamble—once even joining him at roulette, leading him to call her his “gambler wife”—apparently because she believed that gambling fueled his creative spirit. They desperately needed the money from his writing. Kaufman interprets Anna’s behavior toward her husband as shrewd and strategic, although he concedes that contemporary readers may see their relationship “as an unhealthy codependency between a volatile artist and submissive peacekeeper.” Certainly she showed considerable strength when she took control of the production and sale of her husband’s works. As one of Russia’s first female publishers, she proved an astounding success, and she defiantly burnished Dostoevsky’s posthumous reputation.
A deeply researched, informative literary biography.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-53714-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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