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
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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