Roughly every decade since Nicholas and Alexandra (1967), popular historian Massie (Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea, 2003, etc.) publishes a fat volume of European history for an eager readership; his latest will not disappoint.
Catherine the Great (1729–1796) was princess of a minor German state whose big chance arrived when she married Russian Czarina Elizabeth’s nephew and successor, a minor German duke who was unattractive, immature and lazy. Catherine was the opposite, so she passed a stormy, mostly unhappy 17 years before Elizabeth’s death in 1761; six months later Catherine snatched the throne from her husband. Under her energetic leadership, Russia modernized, expanded its empire and became accepted as one of the great powers of Europe. As attracted to Enlightenment ideas as contemporary monarchs, Catherine corresponded with and showered honors on Voltaire, Diderot and other French philosophers, and considered herself an enlightened despot but quickly gave up reform efforts in the face of aristocratic resistance. In the end, she ruled with an iron fist, tolerated little opposition and brutally suppressed several rebellions. Massie writes old-fashioned politics-and-great-men history, but few readers will resist his gripping description of colorful national leaders, their cutthroat rivalries and incessant wars. Most of this occurs after the 250-page mark, when Catherine takes power. Until then, the author recounts interminable petty intrigues, love affairs and itineraries of overprivileged, underemployed Russian aristocrats. His portraits of Catherine and other leading figures reveals a seemingly clairvoyant knowledge of their thoughts, emotions and conversation. Despite these lowbrow historical techniques, Massie delivers a fascinating account of dog-eat-dog politics in 18th-century Europe and the larger-than-life Russian empress who gave as good as she got.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-679-45672-8
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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