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DREISER'S RUSSIAN DIARY

Notes on Theodore Dreiser's two-month 192728 tour of the Soviet Union that provided the material for the book Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928). Its title notwithstanding, much of this ``diary'' was penned by American-born Ruth Epperson Kennell, then living in Russia. As Dreiser's secretary (and lover), she kept notes that Dreiser reviewed and annotated at the time, and later edited. Together, they describe visits to places as varied as the Hermitage, the State Circus, the Czar's Village (``the worst palace I have ever seen,'' says Kennell in Dreiser's voice), a candy factory, an ``electro- mechanical'' plant, and a coal mine. In addition to chatting with Communist bureaucrats (questioned with terrier-like tenacity, as he tries to expose failings in the system), Dreiser converses with people ranging from Sergei Eisenstein and Konstantin Stanislavski to a woman who, mistaking the author and his entourage for an inspection commission, complains of dampness in her walls. Although Kennell includes comments to please people at VOKS (the government cultural agency to whom, without telling Dreiser, she supplied a duplicate of most of her portion of the diary), much here will be interesting to scholars—particularly when read in conjunction with Dreiser's 1928 volume and with Kennell's own book on the trip. En route to Russia, Dreiser speculates that after a revolution ``the miraculous will become the real,'' and, indeed, he is determined to see the ``real'' Russia. At times, perhaps, the experiences become a bit too real, as Dreiser grouses about unreliable trains, mediocre food, and seemingly ever-present filth. By the end of the tour he has seen enough reality to say (per Kennell-Dreiser), ``My one desire is to get out of here as quickly as possible and back to America.'' The editors, Riggio (English/Univ. of Connecticut) and West (English/Pennsylvania State Univ.), have prepared a volume that is primarily for those interested in Dreiser or in the USSR of the 1920s.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8122-8091-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...

A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.

In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010

Awards & Accolades

  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...

Awards & Accolades

  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.

In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005

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