Uneven, hauntingly revealing and gorgeously sad, these entries reveal a wife's desperate love and estrangement from her...
A lively reworked translation of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries, first published in Russia in 1978 and the United Kingdom in 1985.
Sixteen years younger than the already famous Russian novelist, as well as self-consciously less educated and worldly, Sofia Behrs was 18 when they married in 1862. For most of the next five decades the couple lived at his ancestral 4,000-acre estate at Yasnaya Polyana, a perennial bane to upkeep, especially as Sofia was absorbed in the care and education of their 13 children (several died of illnesses) while her husband was engrossed in his writing and fame. In this diary she kept from 1862 until her death in 1919 (her husband died in 1910), Sofia indicated early on troubling fissures between the two that grew wider and more perilous as the years passed. There was a large rift between Tolstoy's idealized version of family life and what Sofia learned was truly the case—his emotional coldness (which he made up in sexual ardor), disregard for the care of the children and belittling of her role in his greatness. “There are times in this useless life of mine,” she wrote in 1890, “when I am overwhelmed with despair and long to kill myself, run away, fall in love with someone else—anything not to have to live with this man who for some reason I have always loved.” Despite the domestic drudgery, she insisted on copying out his corrected pages, which kept her involved in his life and immersed in his artistry. “Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius,” she wrote in late 1866, when she was copying War and Peace. However, the bitterness continued to seep in, as well as a yearning for “some personal happiness, a private life and work of my own”—and, above all, the desire to feel needed and have her love returned.
Uneven, hauntingly revealing and gorgeously sad, these entries reveal a wife's desperate love and estrangement from her brilliant but complex and troubled husband.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-199741-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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