Short on literary and historical perspective, Rayfield's exhaustive work nevertheless will be the definitive biography of Chekhov the private and family man. Rayfield, an established Chekhov scholar (Univ. of London), approached this project with a specific agenda: to offer an account specifically of his private life. Within this scope, Rayfield's goal is to provide a picture of Chekhov more complex than that suggested by other biographers or by the incomplete archival materials previously available. The cumulative impact of its 700 pages confirms Rayfield's claim that ``the complexity, selflessness and depth of the man become even clearer when we fully account for his human strengths and failings.'' This is a biography full of surprises. Although it is peppered with famous and colorful personalities such as the writers Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bunin, as well as figures from Russia's publishing and theater worlds, it is Chekhov's family members who make the most lasting impression: the tyrannical father, the bohemian and unreliable brothers, the dependent and jealous younger sister. The unexpected pleasure of Rayfield's biography is that the bountiful, sometimes overwhelming detail of Chekhov's private life—his own and his four siblings' habits, careers, movements, and finances—provide a fascinating and intimate look at this tendentious, temperamental family. As the extent to which Anton was his family's pivotal emotional figure and provider becomes clearer, one senses the value of Rayfield's endless evidence of financial arrangements, constant changes of domicile, and Anton's various real-estate adventures and debacles. The book suffers stylistically from too many mere listings. Still, Rayfield conveys what he succinctly states at the outset: Chekhov's life is, ``above all, a life enthralling for its own sake.'' Some may take issue with Rayfield's Joe Friday (``Just the facts, ma'am'') approach, but it will be difficult to fault or outdo his meticulous research. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5747-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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