Impeccable scholarship, though it lacks Petrine panache. (16 illustrations and map, not seen)
Biography of the tsar who aimed the Russian head, if not the heart, westward.
Following up on Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998), Hughes (History/University Coll., London) returns to familiar terrain with a new focus: the life of the man who dominated the vast Russian stage from the time he inherited the throne at age ten until his death in 1725. Born in 1672 into a huge family (16 children), Peter grew up in a country far more primitive than the one he would bequeath. Russia had no schools or universities; 90% of the population belonged to the peasant class. Hughes characterizes Peter as striking in many ways. He was large (over six-and-a-half feet), curious, energetic, willful, practical, and organized—qualities he would retain until his dying days. He loved food, drink, practical jokes. He escaped from a passionless arranged marriage by packing his protesting wife off to a convent, then married the redoubtable Catherine, who would reign after his death. Although Hughes recognizes and emphasizes Peter’s accomplishments, she does not conceal his flaws and cruelty. Opponents were tortured, beaten, executed. Near the end of his life, he beheaded one of Catherine’s rumored lovers and presented her the capital relic preserved in a jar. Adhering principally to documentary evidence, Hughes takes us along with Peter as he attempts to revolutionize his country’s fashions (he favored German clothing), educational system, governmental bureaucracy, inheritance laws, and religion (he made certain the church remained subservient to the state). She also shows us Peter’s abiding passion for sailing and lets us see the tsar dressed as a Dutch shipbuilder learning all he can from the masters of the sea in the Netherlands. Another passion—never realized—was to eliminate corruption in the ruling classes. Hughes notes that virtually all of Peter’s specific initiatives are long gone, but he did make Russia a great world power.
Impeccable scholarship, though it lacks Petrine panache. (16 illustrations and map, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-300-09426-4
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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