An independent historian's highly romanticized tale of the daring, calculating grand duchess who was among the few Romanovs to survive the Russian Revolution. Fans of European royalty and their histories will relish the story of Victoria Melita (18761939), otherwise known by her nickname, Ducky. Granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and the Russian emperor Alexander II, Ducky embodied the end of an era and a way of life for Europe's intermarried royal families. Her first marriage, to Prince Ernest (``Ernie'') Ludwig of Heese and the Rhine, was something of a coup for its promoter, Queen Victoria. But it was a tragedy for Ducky. After several years, the source of the couple's incompatibility—Ernie's homosexuality—became known to Ducky. Acting with admirable pluck and characteristic self-assurance, she divorced him. She went on to establish an extended affair with her first cousin, the Grand Duke Kirill of Russia. Flouting both an ecclesiastical and imperial ban on their union, the cousins married. After the revolution, they escaped to France. There, guided by Ducky's ambition and sense of self-importance, the two presented themselves as claimants to the Romanov throne. After losing her country, her riches, her home, and her family, Ducky also lost true love; the revelation of a certain (but still secret) behavior by Kirill broke her heart and led to her death. Sullivan's emphasis on the culture of European royalty is both this book's major attraction and its greatest weakness. So exaggerated is the author's regard for the royal families that he repeatedly frames the great historical events of the era around their gatherings, marriages, and deaths. The downfall of the Russian Empire, for example, is discussed not in terms of broader political and economic factors, but only in terms of the destructive influence and exaggerated power of Tsar Nicholas's wife, Alexandra. Interest in royalty is not in and of itself a bad thing. But distortion of history for the sake of this interest is.
Pub Date: May 21, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42400-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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
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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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