by Vanora Bennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2004
A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.
Moody Russian days from London Times correspondent Bennett.
The journalist had flirted with Soviet Russia for some years before 1991, when she wangled a job as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the Los Angeles Times. Here, she doesn’t concentrate on the breaking stories of the time, but on the less covered subjects of daily life, personal bemusements, and food. For the Russian on the street, as Bennett sees it, food is love, and caviar is its purest expression: “Does caviar actually taste good? That question is pointless. Your spoonful of black eggs is full of far more than salt and oil and protein. It is weighed down with symbolism.” Yes, Bennett likes the taste, but she likes caviar’s symbolism even more: it’s the food of regret and nostalgia, of conquest (“a delicacy snatched from the mouths of the defeated khans”), of dashing, freebooting Cossack caviar traders. Thoughts on this quintessentially Russian delicacy wend their way through the story, but don’t overwhelm it. Bennett is interested in topics as diverse as azart, the give-a-damn strain running through many Russians in the early 1990s that means “not being satisfied that you’ve got enough till you’ve got far too much.” She’s fascinated by the old southern lands—“Dagestan, a poor, crime-ridden and mostly Muslim place next door to poor, crime-ridden, mostly Muslim Chechnya”—and more taken with the fantastical coups and crazy semi-wars of the region than the big bloodbath in Chechnya (though she published a book about it, Crying Wolf, in the UK). The more obscure conflicts tell us more about life in the area, Bennett believes. She also notes, as press reports rarely do, that after all the insanity, “gradually people went back to living their real lives. . . . Most people were sick of excess.” Azart was replaced with “a taste for dull bourgeois luxuries,” and “everyone I knew had a respectable job to go to in the mornings.”
A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7553-0063-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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