A tangled tale—but now that we have Anastasia’s bones, Russian royal-watchers may find this a pleasing historical account.
An exiled Russian noblewoman turns Bolshevik, courtesy of Hitler.
Sophy Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother, left Russia as a child, fleeing with her family following the October Revolution. “Emotional, contradictory, troubled,” as her granddaughter puts it, she sported in the bohemian scene in Paris, married young and moved to England—but then returned to France following the Nazi occupation to tend to her mother. “Sofka,” as the grandmother was called, kept careful notes of what she saw: “All music has ceased on all French wireless transmissions,” she records, “dancing is forbidden.” Her husband, an RAF gunner, was taken prisoner; then she, too, was interned as an enemy alien. Still something of an ingénue, she became a socialist and activist as a prisoner, even refusing repatriation to continue her work helping organize escapes—until she eventually set herself loose, in an entirely improbable turn of events. Zinovieff capably recounts her grandmother’s life, her narrative aided by diaries, journals and even a published autobiography, filling in details that her grandmother had omitted for one reason or another. As Zinovieff writes of one affair, “I wondered why she left these gaps; it certainly wasn’t prudery.” A committed member of the Communist Party following the war, the aging Sofka became an apologist for Stalinism, lauded within the Soviet Union for having shed her class-enemy status and embraced the cause, though not above using her royal status when it served her. “Her excuse for Soviet oppression,” Zinovieff writes, “was that it…was a continuation of what she called ‘the historical, paranoid fear of dissent that has dogged Russian rulers through the centuries.’ ” Mostly, however, the picture of Sofka that emerges is less a propagandist than a slightly more weathered, Bolshevik version of Auntie Mame.
A tangled tale—but now that we have Anastasia’s bones, Russian royal-watchers may find this a pleasing historical account.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60598-009-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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