Wheeler is impressively well read in Russia’s literary golden age, but her pocket biographies could better blend with her...
The veteran British travel writer roams around Russia, inspired by some of its most storied writers.
In the introduction to this adventurous but not always cohesive book, Wheeler (Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2010, 2011, etc.) notes that she aspires to show how Russian literary titans like Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoy spoke both to their time and to present-day Russia. However, in most of the pages that follow, she’s not engaging in socio-literary criticism so much as using those authors to lend gravitas to her efforts to grasp the country’s current melancholic mood. Near Pushkin’s ancestral home, she met a man boozily complaining about Putin; a chapter ostensibly about Dostoyevsky detours into her struggles learning Russian, nearly getting mugged at a St. Petersburg train station, and meeting some couch-surfing youths. Wheeler notes that her Russian teacher adores Turgenev but never explains why; a trip to the Caucasus to walk in Lermontov’s footsteps leads to some digressive grousing about the country’s poor preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and sour conclusion that “being Russian has always been miserable.” This rhetorical disconnect is especially unfortunate because the text sings when Wheeler thoughtfully weaves her chosen writers with her travels. In Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel, Oblomov, she finds a Bartleby-esque symbol of the national character, particularly in his hometown in Russia’s far eastern region, where there are now “dozens of sets of traffic lights, many of which work.” Wheeler’s admiring visit to Tolstoy’s estate thoughtfully captures the author’s mordant mood and his hypocrisies—e.g., his churchy pronouncements about austerity belied more than a dozen illegitimate children). More often, though, the book is best appreciated as light travelogue bolstered with some literary history.
Wheeler is impressively well read in Russia’s literary golden age, but her pocket biographies could better blend with her excursions.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4801-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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