Thanks to this intrepid author, Lata Brandisová re-enters the hall of champions to inspire those who come after her.
Biography of a Czech countess who “confront[ed] the warrior-athletes of the Third Reich in a sporting contest so extreme in its dangers that some would question its right to be called sport.”
Askwith (People Power, 2018, etc.) does admirable literary detective work in unearthing the remarkable story of Countess Lata Brandisová (1895-1981), whose early life coincided with an era of glittering aristocratic privilege followed by the catastrophic destruction brought on by World War I. Hailing from a large noble family with Austrian roots in a sprawling inherited estate in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Lata was mostly home-schooled and largely “ungovernable.” With her siblings, she ran wild throughout the estate grounds, and she was passionate about the horses acquired by her father, a former cavalry officer who had “limited cash but plenty of dash.” Bohemian hunters were famous for their riding prowess, and many of the huntsmen were actually English expatriates who competed in the reckless steeplechase, a sport whose premier event was the Grand Pardubice. Yet the privilege to ride in it—or folly for the horses, 29 of which have died during over the past 145 years—fell to the men, at least until World War I shook up the “inertia of the age.” Despite the abolishment of aristocratic titles and the breakup of her family’s inherited lands, Lata grew in confidence and applied for an amateur jockey license in 1927. At the same time, her cousin was elected to the Prague Jockey Club and introduced her to her first equine partner, and she ran her first Grand Pardubice, with disastrous results. Askwith depicts suspensefully Lata’s amazing mettle and perseverance over the next few years despite the notorious difficulty of the race. In 1937, riding against the Nazi-owned top-of-the-line horses (“Himmler’s Cavalry”), Lata won, to the astonishment of 40,000 spectators “mad with joy.”
Thanks to this intrepid author, Lata Brandisová re-enters the hall of champions to inspire those who come after her.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-210-5
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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