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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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