An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and another top-notch work from Damrosch.
A vivid chronicle of the passions of an 18th-century libertine.
Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) has been the subject of many biographies, based largely on edited and sometimes sanitized versions of his Histoire de ma vie, in which he recounted more than 100 sexual conquests, relentless travels, and a lifetime spent perpetrating scams and cons. Damrosch, an award-winning biographer of Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and others, offers a close critical study of the original manuscript and of supplementary texts that include hundreds of pages of unpublished works. The result is a nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites who was determined to free himself from all manner of repression. He was, Damrosch writes, not “just a bad boy, he was a particular kind of bad boy” whose sexual encounters were “opportunistic and [sometimes] disturbingly exploitative.” He engaged in pedophilia (though, as Damrosch explains, the age of consent at the time was 10), incest, and gang rape; claimed to have occult powers; and lost fortunes gambling. Born to actors in Venice, Casanova imbibed the spirit of the swarming, culturally diverse city. The major industry, Damrosch writes, “was pleasure,” and Casanova, drawn to role-playing, fascinated by cross-dressing, and an “instinctive improvisor,” thrived there. Damrosch hews closely to the narrative of the Histoire, testing Casanova’s version—and the analyses of previous biographers—against available historical evidence. Still, his portrait is not a corrective to what is already well known but rather an amplification. Although he states at the outset that “the story of a notorious seducer needs to be addressed frankly and critically,” Damrosch ably demonstrates his subject’s energy and intelligence, “the joie de vivre, the enormous risks and hair-raising escapes, the lifelong struggle to invent and reinvent himself,” as well as his impressive talent in creating a memoir “bursting with vitality”—an apt description for this beautifully illustrated biography.
An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and another top-notch work from Damrosch.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-24828-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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