A Zelig-like figure, Czapski is, by Karpeles’ account, “largely unknown to American readers and artists.” This fine...
Engaging life of a little-known artist and writer who was on hand for some of the 20th century’s major events.
Józef Czapski’s long life (1896-1993) stretched over almost all the 20th century, and he knew everyone. Descended from “various noble houses—Baltic, Austrian, Russian—with a smattering of Polish ancestry,” he considered himself a Pole. He was more liberal than his mother, who employed only Catholic servants at the family’s estate, but he shared her broad interests and intelligence. Czapski entered the Polish army during World War I and was soon given a special assignment because of his fluency in Russian: namely, to travel inside Bolshevik Russia and retrieve three Polish officers who had disappeared there. At the beginning of World War II, when Poland was invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union—“a stab in the back,” Czapski wrote, “that accelerated the collapse of our last holdout against two great totalitarian powers”—he narrowly avoided being executed by the Soviets, an atrocity for which he would ever after seek justice (and attain a small measure of it toward the end of his life). Along the way, he had a love affair with a member of the Nabokov clan, painted exquisite portraits, wrote books on Proust and other subjects, and traveled everywhere, including America, for which he had little enthusiasm. Writes biographer and translator Karpeles (Paintings in Proust, 2008, etc.), who discovered Czapski accidentally through a friend who himself discovered him through a chance remark by Canadian writer Mavis Gallant about the brilliant Polish exile community in Paris, “he spared himself no disenchantment.” A central episode in Czapski’s life was his internment in Russia before being allowed to go to British territory, which he recounts in Inhuman Land (just published, also by NYRB); Karpeles sheds abundant light on that episode, giving us a nuanced portrait of a man of parts.
A Zelig-like figure, Czapski is, by Karpeles’ account, “largely unknown to American readers and artists.” This fine biography serves as a useful corrective.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-284-6
Page Count: 460
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Well-written, often poignant and surprisingly relatable.
Memoir of a literature professor who converted to Christianity in the halls of Oxford University.
Coming home for the holidays, Weber (English/Seattle Univ.) had a handsome young man with a jewelry box in his pocket waiting for her at the gate. Most girls would be excited, but not the author. As her ex–fiancé-to-be awaited her arrival, Weber found herself confiding to a concerned stranger that she'd been thinking about someone else: Jesus. It's an inauspicious beginning for a conversion story, inciting the same adverse reaction in readers as the author’s agnostic friends—nice, well-educated girls do not break up with their boyfriends and become Christians. But a lot has changed since Weber began her graduate studies at Oxford, an establishment where semesters with names like "Michaelmas" and "Hilary" frame a touching narrative of friendship, love and faith. There, the author was just as often inspired by Keats and the Beatles as she was by the Gospel. Weaving lines of poetry, philosophy and scripture into her narrative, Weber grasps at the meaning of life in the pages of great works of literature and overcomes her own childhood cynicism. Ultimately, a boy she refers to as TDK (i.e., tall, dark and handsome) won her heart and encouraged her to convert. When normal, 20-something trials ensued, notably a visit from a Georgia Peach in designer stilettos who threatened to steal her crush, the author’s new faith was put to the test. The delicately crafted moments when Weber’s faith allowed her to think more clearly and walk more gracefully through her life are, much like her romance, worth the wait.
Well-written, often poignant and surprisingly relatable.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8499-4611-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance...
A showcase of the work of activists and participants in the Stonewall uprising, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary.
With his discerning selections, editor Baumann (editor: Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, 2019, etc.)—assistant director for collection development for the New York Public Library and coordinator of the library’s LGBT Initiative—provides a street-level view of the Stonewall uprising, which helped launch the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. Through his skillful curation, he offers a corrective for what is too often a sanitized, homogenous, and whitewashed portrayal of academics and professionals about the event sometimes termed “the hairpin drop heard around the world.” By gathering vibrant and varied experiences of diverse contributors, the collection reflects the economic, gender, racial, and ethnic complexity of the LGBTQ community at a time when behaviors such as same-sex dancing were criminalized. Featuring essays, interviews, personal accounts, and news articles, Baumann’s archival project accurately and meticulously captures an era of social unrest; the conversation about institutional discrimination and inequality presented here remains as revolutionary today as it did 50 years ago. The anthology invites us to look closely at the unresolved social dynamics of a population defined by its diversity, confronting sexism, racism, classism, and internalized homophobia alongside a broad view of institutional discrimination, heteronormativity, and sexual repression. Voices of significant leaders sit beside stories from participants behind protest lines, police raids, and street harassment, and the mounting frustration with an oppressive status quo becomes palpable on every page. The first-person narratives collected here effectively spotlight the social inequalities surrounding the LGBTQ community, many of which persist today.
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance and Marc Stein’s The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History for a full education on the events before, during, and after Stonewall.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313351-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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