An earnestly researched effort to reveal fresh perspectives of Chekhov’s life and work that overshoots its mark.
Two years in the life and work of the Russian master.
According to Blaisdell, a professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough College, the years 1886-1887 were momentous for Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). At 26, he maintained a full-time medical practice and was already revealing early symptoms of tuberculosis, yet he also published hundreds of stories and humor pieces for popular St. Petersburg newspapers. While he was also feeling pressure to support his expansive family, he was carefully honing what would become his signature Chekhov-ian style, and he transitioned from his previous pseudonym, Antosha Chekhonte. At this time, writes Blaisdell, “in full command of his literary powers, Chekhov had written more short stories in total than he would in the rest of his productive life.” Among his more memorable works from this period are the short story “The Kiss” and the play Ivanov. Blaisdell relies on a similar approach that he employed with his 2020 title, Creating Anna Karenina. Throughout, he draws from Chekhov’s personal correspondence and references several previous biographies in conjunction with close readings of his numerous stories. “I have tried to show how closely connected his own experiences are to his stories,” writes Blaisdell, “which he adamantly (but disingenuously) denied; for another, I have tried to convey the ‘artistic pleasure’ so many of his stories continue to give us.” While this approach may have worked effectively in the previous book, which focused on one iconic novel, the results here are more scattershot. In trying to connect Chekhov’s correspondence to fragments and distillations of such a wide assortment of stories, the narrative often fails to cohere, yielding a somewhat tiresome reading experience. Though Blaisdell offers meaningful insights into Chekhov’s life and writing, the book is unlikely to attract casual readers of Chekhov.
An earnestly researched effort to reveal fresh perspectives of Chekhov’s life and work that overshoots its mark.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63936-264-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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