Berberova's elegant and uncommon biography of the Russian poet Blok defies easy categorization and is a literary event in its own right. Aleksandr Blok (18801921) was a leader of the Russian Symbolists at the turn of the century and ranks among the greatest modern Russian poets. Of particular interest are Blok's artistic and personal reactions to the revolutionary changes in Russian politics and society during his lifetime: his shift from poetic mysticism to a perception of life deeply colored by historical forces, and his astute predictions about Russia's bloody future. A major English-language biography, Avril Pyman's Life of Aleksandr Blok, appeared in 1979, and readers of his poetry who seek details of the life should still turn to that earlier work. Those more interested in the fin-de-siäcle and revolutionary settings of Blok's creative genius will be well served by this new work. Berberova's essay is as much a portrait of Russian society as it is a story of Blok himself, and in the author's deft hand the two are palpably, convincingly linked. Part of the appeal of this biography is the author's lyrical and highly personal, empathetic voice. Berberova, who died in 1993, was both a professor of Russian literature at Princeton and the author of fiction and an autobiography (The Tattered Cloak, 1991, etc.). She lived until the age of 20 in Blok's St. Petersburg and moved in similar literary circles. As she poignantly relates here, Berberova was present at Blok's deathbed, and she offers a heartfelt interpretation of the poet's death: ``We all felt it was the and of a life, the end of a city, the end of a world.'' Soon after his death, she fled Russia. Aleksandr Blok: A Life is Berberova's profoundly moving posthumous homage to a poet, a city, and an era she knew intimately.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8076-1408-4
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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