An intriguing biography of a ruler whose ruthlessness encompassed art.
The self-aggrandizing Catherine II (1729-1796) was an obsessive, voracious collector.
As art journalist Jaques (A Love for the Beautiful: Discovering America’s Hidden Art, 2012) amply shows in this well-researched biography, Catherine amassed paintings, sculpture, books, jewels, furniture, furs, and palaces not because she was an aesthete, but “to legitimize her shaky claim to rule and reinvent herself as Russia’s enlightened ruler.” Married at 16 to the ineffectual Grand Duke Peter in 1762, with a lover’s help, she staged a coup and installed herself as empress. Shortly after, Peter was murdered. Besides legitimizing her claim to rule, Catherine wanted to put Russia on the international stage as a sophisticated, cultivated nation. By 1791, writes the author, her museum at the Hermitage boasted paintings by Europe’s major artists, 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems, 10,000 drawings, and an extensive natural history collection. She commissioned the best European jewelers to create “rings, earrings, snuffboxes, and exquisite gem flower bouquets.” At the Winter Palace, she filled her diamond chamber with tiaras, aigrettes, hairpins, and a 189-carat diamond “the size of an egg,” she boasted to her friend Voltaire. Notorious for her spending, she also was infamous for a succession of ever younger lovers, bestowing riches and titles upon them as parting gifts. The longest of her relationships was with Grigori Potemkin, who emerged as her co-ruler, persuading her to annex the Crimea. In addition to augmenting Russia’s dominion, the annexation enriched Potemkin with large parcels of land and serfs to toil on them. Jaques notes that Catherine had “drained Russia’s treasury” by 1789 but does not explain the next seven years of unceasing spending. Russia’s opulence did not fool the visiting Swedish king. “These people are not like those in the rest of Europe,” he remarked. “They have the politeness, the brilliance, the grandeur, the wit and the vices, but they do not have the virtues.” The author provides a unique perspective on the woman who “transformed Russia from a northern backwater to global superpower.”
An intriguing biography of a ruler whose ruthlessness encompassed art.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60598-972-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
