Given the Tolstoys' voluminous, unsparing, often shared, and ultimately rather deranged diaries, writing about this prizefight of a union is not much harder than simply showing up at ringside. Using the straight-line, calendar-like procedure of his famous Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer simply follows the count and countess through the rounds of their agonies. Shirer (who died last December) revisits Sonya's devotion as secretary (the woman copied her husband's manuscripts out by hand many times over during their composition — a Herculean task); Leo's personal renunciation of one of the most fabulous gifts of talent in world art in favor of his own brand of obnoxious humility as a Christ figure; the ensuing acolytes; the jealous and largely ignored children; the comings and goings of fellow Russian writers and disciple-ish suck-ups; Sonya's pathetic attempt to snare the attentions of the epicene composer Tanayev and thus win for herself a little well-deserved appreciation. All that's here is complete enough — less schlockily pitched than in Anne Edwards's Sonya (1981) but finally no deeper. A great man's marriage is of legitimate interest, but we need to have some sense of the greatness first. Shirer's stabs at lit crit are negligible ("Again, in the telling of that rough journey to purgatory," he writes apropos of Resurrection, "Tolstoy is wonderful in his descriptions. And he introduces some memorable characters..."), and even his historical references to the foment of Russian society churning around the Tolstoys, to which they certainly contributed, are bare, slack, and unshaped. A.N. Wilson's Tolstoy isn't challenged here by Shirer; it remains the best portrait of the man and the work and the marriage, the troika without any one part of which nothing seems to really move forward.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-88162-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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