A landmark biography. Montefiore goes a long way toward rescuing Potemkin from his promiscuous action-figure reputation by...
A life of Prince Potemkin that starts out as an artful pot-boiler, then turns into a possessing diplomatic history of Potemkin’s role in Russia’s last great push for empire.
So often caricatured as an arrogant and indolent debauchée, Potemkin gets his record set straight: recklessly indulgent, yes, but a force of nature, relentlessly ambitious, inspired and quixotic, the guiding figure of Catherine II’s rule. From the moment Potemkin first takes the Empress’s notice to his death on the Bessarabian steppe, Montefiore dogs his heels, building the case for Potemkin as an equal of Peter the Great: expanding the empire, building the Black Sea Fleet, taking the Crimea and establishing the likes of Sebastopol and Odessa. In particular, he demonstrates how Potemkin and Catherine’s evolving relationship, from lovers to what amounts to co-rulers, was an alliance remarkable for both its intimacy and statecraft. After Potemkin left Catherine’s bed for good, he devised an imperial ménage à trois, supplying the Empresses with suitable lovers but always remaining the real man of the household, a perfect arrangement for the two willful, dominating personalities. Potemkin’s “scientific longing for knowledge, mercantile enthusiasm, and purely imperial aggrandizement” shines through, as do his abilities as a soldier and a military tactician. Montefiore keeps readers’ interest piqued with a fascination of minutiae, for instance a terrific day-in-the-life chapter of the subject when he was in his 40s, or his development of a silk industry on his Crimean mulberry plantations, or a thorough debunking of the “Potemkin Village” malarky, how he might have lost his eye, how he most certainly took his nieces as mistresses. That he ruled “like an emperor” from the River Bug to the Caspian, from the Caucasus almost to Kiev, is evidence enough of his mark on history.
A landmark biography. Montefiore goes a long way toward rescuing Potemkin from his promiscuous action-figure reputation by justifiably rubbing a fair share of Catherine’s greatness off onto, in Jeremy Bentham’s words, the Prince of Princes.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27815-2
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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