Dense and exhaustive, a valiant attempt to capture the essence of a life that defies simple retelling.
A glimpse into the foggy biography of the mother of modern spiritualism.
Former Blondie member and prolific writer Lachman (The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus, 2011, etc.) attempts to pin down the nearly impenetrable life story of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (often referred to as HPB), a 19th-century Russian best known as the founder of a mystical practice she called Theosophy. In the author’s view, “anyone who meditates, or considers himself a Buddhist, or is interested in reincarnation, or has thought about karma” owes a debt to HPB. After a childhood filled with creaky manors and imaginary friends, Blavatsky was propelled by her interest in the occult into a life of travel that led her throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. Upon her arrival in New York in 1873, she befriended journalist and Civil War veteran Henry Olcott; the pair founded the Theosophical Society, an organization committed to furthering their studies in religion and the occult. Despite Lachman’s extensive research on HPB’s life and accomplishments, he struggles to make sense of this “profoundly contradictory character.” Confirmable biographical information is scant, and readers are left with more speculations than conclusions. Occasionally, Lachman apologizes for the convoluted narrative (“if the reader feels a bit dizzy after all this, I can’t blame him”), yet the book’s complexities are more the result of HPB’s own mythmaking than any major authorial shortcomings. Near the conclusion, the author alludes to his frustration with HPB’s highly interpretive accounts of her history and provides what closure he can. “Although practically nothing about her life is certain,” he writes, “one thing is for sure: the world is a far less interesting place without her.”
Dense and exhaustive, a valiant attempt to capture the essence of a life that defies simple retelling.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58542-863-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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