Casanova’s adventures include plenty of juicy details, and Bergreen weaves in just enough to prove his reputation. His...
Bergreen (Columbus: The Four Voyages, 2011, etc.) applies his historical storytelling skills to the famous Venetian lover, introducing his intellectual side.
Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was the child of two actors from whom he inherited and perfected his playacting abilities, which he used to his advantage as a social climber. He trained for the church and received a doctorate in civil and canon law at age 16, giving him the basis for his exceptional writings. His mother deserted him and set the pattern for the Casanova Syndrome of seduction and abandonment. He was a libertine and proud of it; he felt it better to be notorious than obscure. He was an adventurer, mathematician, musician, and literary genius, but he was also an obsessive gambler, losing and gaining fortune after fortune. One of his most successful gambles was instituting the French lottery for the state in 1758. It continued to be successful even through the French Revolution, paying for the Ecole Militaire where Napoleon trained. (It was Napoleon who eventually caused the collapse of Casanova’s beloved Venice.) Casanova usually fell in love with his conquests, and sometimes he actually failed to convince his lover to submit to him. Condemned as an atheist by the Inquisition, he was locked up in a miserable prison on the top floor of the Doge’s Palace. It would be nearly two decades before he was pardoned and allowed to return to Venice. Throughout, Bergreen makes good use of an excellent translation of his subject’s 12-volume memoir. While it was published shortly after his death, it was censored and edited, and the first unexpurgated version didn’t appear until 1960. The author neatly captures Casanova’s voice, “often amused, but rarely mocking, conversational yet highly literary, and simultaneously vulgar and brilliant.”
Casanova’s adventures include plenty of juicy details, and Bergreen weaves in just enough to prove his reputation. His travels during one of history’s most exciting periods will be great fun for any history lover.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1649-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
At-times inspirational memoir about a journalist’s battle with a grave disease she had to face while also dealing with her...
With the assistance of Chambers (co-author; Yes, Chef, 2012, etc.), broadcaster Roberts (From the Heart: Eight Rules to Live By, 2008) chronicles her struggles with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare condition that affects blood and bone marrow.
The author is a well-known newscaster, formerly on SportsCenter and now one of the anchors of Good Morning America. In 2007, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she successfully fought with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Five years later, after returning from her news assignment covering the 2012 Academy Awards, she learned that chemotherapy had resulted in her developing MDS, which led to an acute form of leukemia. Without a bone marrow transplant, her projected life expectancy was two years. While Roberts searched for a compatible donor and prepared for the transplant, her aging mother’s health also began to gravely deteriorate. Roberts faced her misfortune with an athlete’s mentality, showing strength against both her disease and the loss of her mother. This is reflected in her narration, which rarely veers toward melodrama or self-pity. Even in the chapters describing the transplantion process and its immediate aftermath, which make for the most intimate parts of the book, Roberts maintains her positivity. However, despite the author’s best efforts to communicate the challenges of her experience and inspire empathy, readers are constantly reminded of her celebrity status and, as a result, are always kept at arm's length. The sections involving Roberts’ family partly counter this problem, since it is in these scenes that she becomes any daughter, any sister, any lover, struggling with a life-threatening disease. “[I]f there’s one thing that spending a year fighting for your life against a rare and insidious…disease will teach you,” she writes, “it’s that time is not to be wasted.”
At-times inspirational memoir about a journalist’s battle with a grave disease she had to face while also dealing with her mother’s passing.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-7845-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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