Peskov, a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, tells the story of a Russian religious dissident who, in 1932, took his wife into the remote Siberian Taiga and remained there, effectively frozen in time, until the 1990s. In 1978, while flying over the upper reaches of the Abakan River, a group of geologists spot what looks like a garden in the midst of the wilderness. On landing, they find not only a garden but paths, a house, and—looking like a vision from the previous century—an old man dressed in patched sacking, speaking a strange dialect. The man, Karp Lykov, and his family are members of a fundamentalist sect called the Old Believers, who insist that they are not permitted to ``live with the world.'' The men and women live separately in this tiny primitive colony. We see daughter Agafia climb nimbly up pine trees to knock off the nuts for her father; we see the pitch dark house with no lighting. Later, as the Lykovs become slowly acquainted with the surrounding Russian society, we see their first reactions to horses, modern buildings, trains, and a boxing match, which so horrifies Agafia that she flees from it. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this saga is the Old Believers' system of counting time, which they reckon as did people before the time of Peter the Great: by the Psalter and the lunar phases. Given the resistance to modernity among religious fanatics, and given Russia's troubled encounter with modernity and the vastness of the land, Peskov writes, ``it is not hard to imagine many similar retreats cropping up...The taiga has swallowed up many small monasteries, poor huts and grave crosses.'' At the end of his brisk and informative account, Peskov wonders if the Lykovs—who missed the purges, WW II, and all the shake-ups that followed—were happy with their life in the wilderness. ``I think so,'' he concludes.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47209-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
An eclectic assortment of women make for an entertaining read.
An exuberant celebration of more than 100 women who shaped the myths and realities of New York City.
In her debut book, journalist Scelfo, who has written for the New York Times and Newsweek, aims to counter histories of New York that focus only on “male political leaders and male activists and male cultural tastemakers.” As the author discovered and shows, the contributions of women have been deeply significant, and she has chosen a copious roster of personalities, gathered under three dozen rubrics, such as “The Caretakers” (pioneering physicians Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, who enacted revolutionary hygienic measures in early-20th-century tenements); “The Loudmouths” (Joan Rivers and Better Midler); and “Wall Street” (brokerage firm founder Victoria Woodhull and miserly investor Hetty Green). With a plethora of women to choose from, Scelfo aimed for representation from musical theater, law enforcement, education, social justice movements, and various professions and organizations. Some of the women are familiar (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her preservation work; Brooke Astor for her philanthropy), some iconic (Emma Lazarus, in a category of her own as “The Beacon”), and some little-known (artist Hildreth Meière, whose art deco designs can be seen on the south facade of Radio City Music Hall). One odd category is “The Crooks,” which includes several forgettable women who contributed to the city’s “cons and crimes.” The author’s brief, breezy bios reveal quirky facts about each woman, a form better suited to “The In-Crowd” (restaurateur Elaine Kaufman, hardly a crowd), entertainers (Betty Comden, Ethel Waters), and “The Wisecrackers” (Nora Ephron, Tina Fey) than to Susan Sontag, Edith Wharton, and Joan Didion. Nevertheless, the book is lively and fun, with something, no doubt, to pique anyone’s interest. Heald’s blithe illustrations add to the lighthearted mood.
An eclectic assortment of women make for an entertaining read.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58005-653-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.
A lively history of the Ohio River region in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 2015, etc.) isn’t writing about the sodbusters and hardscrabblers of the Far West, the people whom the word “pioneers” evokes, but instead their predecessors of generations past who crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile country along and north of the Ohio River. Manasseh Cutler, one of his principal figures, “endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity,” anticipated the movement of his compatriots across the mountains well before the war had ended, advocating for the Northwest Ordinance to secure a region that, in McCullough’s words, “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life”—a place in which slavery was forbidden and public education and religious freedom would be emphasized. “Ohio fever” spread throughout a New England crippled, after the war, by economic depression, but Southerners also moved west, fomenting the conditions that would, at the end of McCullough’s vivid narrative, end in regional war three generations later. Characteristically, the author suggests major historical themes without ever arguing them as such. For example, he acknowledges the iniquities of the slave economy simply by contrasting the conditions along the Ohio between the backwaters of Kentucky and the sprightly city of Cincinnati, speaking through such figures as Charles Dickens. Indeed, his narrative abounds with well-recognized figures in American history—John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johnny Appleseed—while highlighting lesser-known players. His account of Aaron Burr—who conspired to overthrow the government of Mexico (and, later, his own country) after killing Alexander Hamilton, recruiting confederates in the Ohio River country—is alone worth the price of admission. There are many other fine moments, as well, including a brief account of the generosity that one farmer in Marietta, Ohio, showed to his starving neighbors and another charting the fortunes of the early Whigs in opposing the “anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration.”
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6868-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
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