A stirring recollection of the impact of global politics on one man’s family.
In a posthumously published memoir, a Russian man relives the turbulence of revolution and war in the 20th century.
Debut author Kochanowsky was born in Siberia in 1905 in the culturally bustling city of Krasnoyarsk. As part of a talented, ambitious family, he was driven to be academically successful; he also became an accomplished piano player and learned to love the opera and Beethoven. Even World War I barely touched his remote home. However, the Russian Revolution in 1917 shattered his idyllic upbringing; after the rise of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, war and tyranny arrived at his doorstep. Thousands of people died in Krasnoyarsk, and Communist soldiers unceremoniously confiscated property that belonged to the author’s family. The Kochanowskys finally fled, and the author decided that they had no choice but to escape to China. They made their way to the Chinese city of Harbin, and the author later moved to Freiberg, Germany, where he put himself through school by working as a coal miner. However, he later witnessed the rise of the Nazis in Dusseldorf, in the ugly form of Kristallnacht. Although he’d always attended Christian churches, the Gestapo declared him to be Jewish, due to his family history, which made his life in Germany dangerous; he traveled around the country to avoid capture and hoped to one day make his way to the United States. After several close calls with the Gestapo and some jail time, Kochanowsky was able to make it to Switzerland, where he met his future wife. From there they moved to Argentina and, finally, in 1953, to New York City. The story in this memoir is consistently inspiring, and Kochanowsky is right to label himself a “moral athlete,” as he shows how he remained unwaveringly committed to his ideals despite great danger and temptation. Of course, the story is dominated by his experiences with geopolitical turmoil, but he also writes charmingly of art, romance, and even sex. Along the way, he also avoids the resentful cynicism that often results from extraordinary loss. This manuscript was prepared by the author’s daughter, Vera Kochanowsky, and she includes a foreword that affectionately describes her own remembrances of him. Overall, this is a moving memoir and a marvelous firsthand account of one of the most momentous eras in modern history.
A stirring recollection of the impact of global politics on one man’s family.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6171-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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