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BYRON

Name: BYRON
Author: Phyllis Grosskurth
ISBN: 0-395-69379-9

THE FLAWED ANGEL

by Phyllis Grosskurth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 1997

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This fairly routine psychobiography adequately chronicles the life, loves, and poems of Romantic literature's most famous rake. Lord Byron (17881824) was, as one of his most notorious mistresses put it, ``mad, bad, and dangerous to know.'' His violent, overweening ego was in great measure fostered by a doting mother. Estranged from her husband, she raised her son in modest circumstances in her native Scotland; but a series of unexpected deaths in the family brought ten-year-old George Gordon the Byron title, thrusting him from his childhood idyll into the world of the English peerage. Grosskurth (The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, 1991; Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought/Univ. of Toronto) vividly limns Byron's school days at Harrow, although his years at Cambridge, and indeed his intellectual formation generally, remain hazy. She judiciously presents the evidence for Byron's very early sexual initiations by a servant woman and by a lecherous lord. Upon his return from his Grand Tour of the Continent, the thinly veiled autobiography of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage caused a sensation. Years of tremendous extravagance followed, marked by huge debts and scores of polymorphous sexual conquests, but Byron outdid himself by conducting a liaison with his own half-sister. Driven to the Continent by creditors, moralists, and a failed marriage (about which Grosskurth offers important new research), Byron fell in with the Shelleys and reached new maturity as a poet. Grosskurth's best chapters treat his final exile, ending in Greece, where he fought for that nation's independence and died of a fever at age 36. In these chapters her underargued psychoanalytic claims—for instance, that Byron was ``tortured by guilt about both his homosexuality and the incest with Augusta''—go on the back burner, and everyday vignettes that show his charisma come to the fore. But too often, unfortunately, Grosskurth's meticulous cataloguing of Byron's madness and badness deadens the reader to this mercurial sadist's attractiveness—that is, to what made him dangerous. (24 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: April 15, 1997

ISBN: 0-395-69379-9

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.