This is the first volume of a marvelously detailed diary kept by Bashkirtseff, an enterprising young woman entering the opulent adult world of Europe during the late 1800s with style and promise, but kicking all the way. Bashkirtseff narrates the splendors of Europe's favorite watering holes (Baden, Nice, Naples) and cultural seasons (Vienna, Geneva, London, and Rome) through the eyes of an adolescent at odds with the constraints of a male-dominated society. By the age of 12, Marie knew that ``she was born to be a remarkable woman.'' Troubled by a burning desire for grandeur and the humiliation brought upon her by her family's negligent financial position in society, she navigates through hostility and longing, leaving over just enough joie to appreciate a beautiful dress, a well-positioned box at the opera, and the carefully choreographed glances of men. As she ventures into the world of masked balls, operettas, and strolls along the promenade, she turns heads all along the way. Her protestations that only ``men are made to live in society'' ring hollow, considering her own sense of omnipotence: ``I am everything. At shooting I am a man . . . in the water a fish . . . at a party a charming woman. . . . In my bedroom I am Venus.'' She knows she wants to be the seeker more than the one who is found in any game of hide-and-seek. Perhaps this is the most profound expression of her frustration at the male-dominated world she describes. Marie was gifted with a precociously modern, novelistic temperament that found no echo at the ball. She confesses with detachment that her ``love story is always the same; it always ends with a paroxysm of tears on a hotel rug.'' In later volumes, she takes up politics and the bohemian life. Here, she plays the arrogant adolescent in a world gone by. Do stay tuned; this feisty young life will take flight.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8118-0224-8
Page Count: 435
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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
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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