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 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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