The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.
A scholar’s debut recounts the life and troubling death of a Gilded Age woman.
In the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., a brooding, bronze figure marks the too-early grave of Marion Hooper “Clover” Adams (1843–1885), known, if at all, to posterity as the wife of a distinguished man and as a suicide. This shrouded, enigmatic Saint-Gaudens masterpiece appears almost to warn off biographers intent on probing the puzzle of Clover’s life. But Dykstra (English/Hope Coll.) proceeds boldly and supplies us with all the recoverable details, even if the mystery remains. A child of privilege in Transcendental Boston, Clover received the best progressive education then available to young women. She came of age during the Civil War, bold, athletic and passionate about art, reading and foreign languages. She charmed the likes of John Hay, Clarence King, Henry James and, of course, her husband, the celebrated professor, editor and historian Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents. (Indeed, both Henrys modeled characters in their novels, at least in part, on her.) Though she confidently presided over a Washington home that sparkled with wit, 13 years into her marriage she swallowed a lethal chemical used in her photography, a three-year-old avocation for which she was beginning to develop a reputation. Why? Dykstra finds shadows in Clover’s seemingly enviable life: the early death of her poet mother (Clover was only five), the suicide of a favorite aunt and the unusual closeness between Clover and her physician father who died only months before she took her own life. Clover’s childlessness and the infatuation of her husband with a pretty, young and unhappily married friend may also have contributed to the overwhelming depression that marked her final months. Relying on letters and photographs, even the placement of pictures in an album, Dykstra teases all this out, occasionally appearing to over-read clues to Clover’s inner life. Is it significant that Clover used one of the tools of her art to kill herself, or was potassium cyanide merely the death-dealing agent closest to hand?
The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-618-87385-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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