A lively rendering of a work long out of print in English. Just the thing for anyone who has to survive in a political world.
Long misjudged by history, Empress Catherine (1762–96) gets a word in for herself.
This new translation of Catherine’s memoirs does much to make her seem a contemporary, or at least not quite so removed from our time. A product of the Enlightenment, Catherine fended off her adolescent loneliness by reading: the classics in their original languages, works in the modern European languages, complex books thought to be above the heads of women. The reason for the 15-year-old’s loneliness? Her husband, scarcely older, who was a bit of a dimwit and more than a bit of a child; when she first meets Peter III of Russia, to whom the young German princess was married off in 1744, he is busily playing soldier with his household staff. Later he graduates to racing dogs in his rooms and beating the losers. “These were truly the games of a child and of perpetual childishness,” Catherine laments, scarcely becoming the future tsar. For her part, the young woman born Sophia Augusta Frederika of Anhalt-Zerbst had early on learned more regal ways: “I saw with pleasure,” she writes, “that from day to day I gained the affections of the public, who regarded me as an interesting child who was not without intelligence.” Certainly the Empress Elizabeth came to regard the young Grand Duchess this way, lamenting, by Catherine’s account, the fact that her protégée should be reading the works of Plato in Greek and brushing up on the masterpieces of Russian literature while her idiot husband was concocting schemes to build a palace in which everyone, the royals included, would dress up like Capuchin monks. No political memoir—and Catherine is a shrewdly political creature through and through—would be complete without its intrigue, and, as Peter discovers, that is surely the case here. As we leave off, Catherine is preparing to deliver a mighty comeuppance, but that’s the stuff of the history books.
A lively rendering of a work long out of print in English. Just the thing for anyone who has to survive in a political world.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-679-64299-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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