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. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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