An excellent short(ish) biography of Theodor Herzl. I knew virtually nothing about him before and appreciated Derek Penslar writing a biography that aAn excellent short(ish) biography of Theodor Herzl. I knew virtually nothing about him before and appreciated Derek Penslar writing a biography that appeared to my unskilled eyes as deeply and originally researched, largely from primary sources. It is a cradle-to-grave biography (with a brief epilogue about how Herzl is remembered and misremembered to this day), and a substantial fraction of it takes place before Herzl comes to Zionism, but that part is interesting too as a portrait of late 19th century Jewish life in Europe among upper class intellectuals. The story really gets going as Herzl starts going through different ways of thinking about a national homeland for the Jews and rediscovers his own Judaism. The substance, process and charisma and also confusion they are bound up with are all on full display. Penslar is balanced and trying to tell the Herzl story from his time not re-reading in ways to fit it into our current debates. Overall, highly recommended--and would love to read more in the Jewish short lives series....more
I listened to this with my teenage children hoping for a combination of enthralling narrative history and also a better understanding of a period in AI listened to this with my teenage children hoping for a combination of enthralling narrative history and also a better understanding of a period in American history that I've often skipped over. Instead I ended up with neither.
Candice Millard embeds a story of the assassination of James Garfield with background on the science of Joseph Lister who advocated sterilization, the science of Alexander Graham Bell who invented a machine that came close to detecting the bullet in Garfield and the life and madness of Garfield's assassin Charles Guiteau. That plus a biography of Garfield. All of it decently interesting but it suffers from the fact that Garfield did not actually do that much as President, the book really centers on his assassination, and his death was long and gruesome--as is the recounting of it in the book.
More frustrating for me was that I felt like I did not learn anything particularly compelling about the politics of the period, beyond debates over the spoils system. It describes the different Republicans squaring off for the nomination but not their different views. It tells little about this transitional period between the end of reconstruction and the expansion of the Gilded Age. I wanted less repetitive story telling and more of broader interest....more
The Andrew RobertsNapoleon: A Life has been staring at me reproachfully from my shelf. I had the same experience American Prometheus: The Triumph andThe Andrew RobertsNapoleon: A Life has been staring at me reproachfully from my shelf. I had the same experience American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer but had enough foresight to start it months before the movie. But it's now too late to read Roberts' tome before the Napoleon movie. Right next to it, mostly forgotten, was the Penguin Lives short biography of Napoleon by Paul Johnson with a black marked line on the bottom that indicates I must have bought it on remainder years ago. So I took that one down from the shelf and read it.
The good thing about the book is that it is relatively short and covers much of Napoleon's life and career from his birth in Corsica to his last years on Saint Helena with much in between helping to fill in a lot of gaps for me. The prose is also very vivid.
The bad thing is the organization jumps around a bit thematically which at times makes it unnecessarily hard to follow. But the worst thing is that Paul Johnson thoroughly detests Napoleon and he doesn't just show that detest he tells it over and over and over again to the point where it becomes tiresome and makes one question much of the rest....more
This biography of Alex Dumas (as Tom Reiss calls him), the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas (author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three MThis biography of Alex Dumas (as Tom Reiss calls him), the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas (author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, among many other novels) reads like an Alexandre Dumas novel. Except it is meticulously researched and presumably true--or at least as true as any biography can be. It also addresses an interesting set of issues of the history of thinking about race in France around the the turn of the 19th century--given that Alex Dumas was half Black, born in what is now Haiti, but rose to be a general in French army at a time when slavery was being banned.
This is the first biography of Alex Dumas who was largely forgotten, in part because his military career was interrupted by an extended stint as a prisoner of war (which helped create some of the background for The Count of Monte Cristo). And also because he, sort of, crossed Napoleon. But mostly because the transition to Napoleon brought back slavery and a changed attitude towards what is now Haiti--and was Alex Dumas' birthplace. Reiss does extensive archival research, including organizing what is basically a break-in of a massive safe with Dumas' papers.
He starts from Alex Dumas' father, an aristocrat in France, chronicles his journey to what is now Haiti, his break with his brother, move to another town, birth of Alex, and then the story basically follows Alex from there as he gives up all connection to his aristocratic upbringing, starts as a private in the army and works his way up to general--and then prisoner.
Along the way Reiss does a great job of providing context and providing some of the deeper connections between the adventurous life and what is happening more broadly. So it is a mini history of the period as well, but all worn lightly and easily digestible amidst the novelesque story that is at the center of this biography....more
An excellent and (apparently) very reliable biography of Stalin. It is by a Russian historian based on the then recently opened archives and is well tAn excellent and (apparently) very reliable biography of Stalin. It is by a Russian historian based on the then recently opened archives and is well translated into English. He occasionally has an agenda--which is portraying Stalin (accurately) as the terrible person he was, against the increasingly positive portrayals and apologia in Russia. But that barely gets in the way of a very well told story that is based on careful parsing of the sources. I particularly loved the structure which was an alternation of more conventional historical/biographical chapters in chronological order with short chapters set in the last days of Stalin's life--each one of which used a moment in the present to focus on a specific theme across Stalin's life (e.g., his relationship to his securities services, his doctors, his family, etc.). It's also a nice length.
This covers much of the same ground as the also excellent Stalin, with slightly less narrative flair and slightly more careful sourcing. For Stalin's early life Young Stalin is also excellent....more
I'm a fan of biographies of scientists and this one had been on my TBR since it was published. For obvious reasons it finally got off my TBR. And it iI'm a fan of biographies of scientists and this one had been on my TBR since it was published. For obvious reasons it finally got off my TBR. And it is an amazing piece of writing but is not really a scientific biography. Which might be fair because if all Robert Oppenheimer did was science I probably would not be reading a biography of him (when I still have not gotten around to The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, among others). But still I really wished the authors explained Oppenheimer's early scientific papers and their consequences. And discussed more of the science and engineering of the bomb and the role that Oppenheimer played in resolving them. I am left feeling that I'm soon going to need to take another book off my TBR shelf, one that has been there even longer, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
The book does have everything a standard biography would have: A little about Oppenheimer's parents, his early life at the Ethical Culture School, college, grad school, early science, all the way through his last years and death. But the overwhelming focus is on his "trial" over revoking his security clearance. It is the not that the trial section itself is quite long (but riveting, like all courtroom dramas, even when you know how it will end). It is that much of what came earlier in the book was planting seeds that the authors come back to in the trial scene. Seeds like Oppenheimer's relationships to communists, his wife's communist first husband, and especially the "Chevalier incident" where someone asked him to spy which is told in gory detail multiple times throughout the book in a way that makes sense for a courtroom drama but in some sense does not for a biography, and certainly not for a scientific biography.
The biography is strong on nuance (for Oppenheimer, not for his tormentor Lewis Strauss who probably does not deserve any nuance). The ways in which Oppenheimer changed. The ways in which he was not the simple hero that the left subsequently wanted to make him (e.g., when he was opposing the H bomb he was supporting tactical nuclear weapons which he thought could actually be used in wars). A number of his political views at all stages were clearly naive and wrong in retrospect. Ultimately, however, he is a great character--fewer flashy anecdotes (and brilliant scientific contributions) than Richard Feynman but a complex and tragic tale that makes for great reading....more
I listened to the audiobook of this short biography of James Joyce. I did not know much about Joyce's life before but this presented a relatively compI listened to the audiobook of this short biography of James Joyce. I did not know much about Joyce's life before but this presented a relatively comprehensive portrait from birth to death, with a lot of detail about both the writing and publication of Ulysses and a summary/literary criticism of it with less space devoted to Joyce's other books. A lot of the focus is on Joyce's relationships to women, including Nora Barnacle (the women he spent his life with) and a series of mostly nameless prostitutes. Although Edna O'Brien asserts that all of this is complex and multifaceted overall Joyce comes across as mostly a self-obsessed jerk--albeit one who produced towering masterworks.
The biography itself is beautifully written with some almost poetic turns of phrase. The audiobook is narrated well with an Irish voice....more
An excellent life of Charlotte Brontë as well as her siblings. It starts in medias res with Brontë in Belgium but then goes back the beginning with heAn excellent life of Charlotte Brontë as well as her siblings. It starts in medias res with Brontë in Belgium but then goes back the beginning with her father, his marriage and his children. The story really picks up in the third chapter when Charlotte and her siblings start composing their imaginary worlds of Glass Town, Angria, Gondol and more. The descriptions of the three girls and their brother lost in their imaginations are almost worth reading standalone even without the full life. It then goes through the father's belief in the son Branwell, his failure, drug addiction, and death juxtaposed against the sisters all doing their writing, the rejection of Charlotte's first novel, the success of Jane Eyre, the release of the other sisters' books, Charlotte's difficulty in capitalization on her initial success, her sisters' death, her introduction to the literary scene in the capital, her marriage, and then her tragic death--with a postscript about the people and letters that survived.
Overall Claire Harman does not encrust Charlotte Brontë with saintly simplicity but instead underscores her turbulence, her unrequited love for the Belgian schoolmaster, and other passions that were mostly contained in her own head and her own family. I haven't read Elizabeth Gaskell's classic biography (but will some day) but Harman both seems to owe her a tremendous debt for writing the first draft of history, including interviewing various people she knew, but also Harman seems to be trying to overcome and rewrite the myths that Gaskell helped to form and perpetuate.
As someone that only knew the barest of the outline of the lives of the Brontë's I was really glad to be able to be absorbed in it and even enjoy some of the suspense (e.g., I didn't know if her true identity was known during her life--it turns out it was).
I should say that I loved Jane Eyre, enjoyed The Professor but could not get through Vilette. But enough of Vilette was autobiographical that now that I have this context--and know better what to expect from it--I'll try again....more
I saw a good review of this graphic biography/analysis of Putin and thought it might be interesting for me and/or my children. I have not convinced thI saw a good review of this graphic biography/analysis of Putin and thought it might be interesting for me and/or my children. I have not convinced them to read it (yet) but I did. It was a useful comprehensive summary of what is known about Putin's youth, his early rise in St. Petersburg politics, and then his tenure as leader of Russia (as President and also leading as Prime Minister) focusing especially on the many killings he has ordered and his bungled response (and possible complicity) in various disasters and attacks (the apartment buildings, theater, school and submarine). It did not add that much to my knowledge but filled in a few gaps and reminded me of a few things. At times it was a bit over the top, if one can say such a thing about the depiction of a murderous dictator, but Cunningham seems to believe and pass along just about every conspiratorial version of everything (including believing that Trump was a Russian agent). It was, however, generally nice drawn and written....more
When you read about Charles Dickens’ life it is striking how much he did other than write his novels. He edited journals, starred and produced in amatWhen you read about Charles Dickens’ life it is striking how much he did other than write his novels. He edited journals, starred and produced in amateur theatricals, did readings, engaged in charitable works, and much much more. After a frenzied start to his writing career (e.g., the writing and publication of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist overlapped), he could go years at time without even working on a novel. It is tempting to wonder whether all of this was time well spent when he only produced 15 novels, much less than the similarly energetic and peripatetic but more focused on writing Honoré de Balzac. The amateur theatricals were, presumably, entertaining for the few hundred people who were involved or saw them but the time could have been used to build on the permanent legacy that Charles Dickens created for humanity.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point helps to partially answer this question by providing a detailed biography of a single year in Dickens' life: 1851. It is an interesting choice because Dickens published nothing of note that year (just some articles in his journal Household Words and much of A Child's History of England). None of the dramatic events of his life (e.g., meeting Ellen Ternan) happened that year, beyond the death of his father, and the year does not even appear in some chronologies of the major events of Dickens’ life and career.
Douglas-Fairhurst, however, chooses this year because Dickens wrote the first several chapters of Bleak House towards the end of 1851 with serial publication starting in March 1852. Bleak House is my favorite Dickens novel and widely considered the beginning of a new darker more complex phase of his writing. By putting the year 1851 under a microscope it is interesting to come across various serendipitous events or thoughts that eventually get reworked into the novel.
Douglas-Fairhurst does not write retroactively, he doesn’t start out to say let’s find everything that led to Bleak House. Instead he writes prospectively, talking about a minute series of events, some of which end up mattering for Dickens’ writing but most of which h do not. In a way, that helps address the question I began with.
I would not recommend this book for newcomers to Dickens. You don’t need much knowledge of his writing (although if you haven’t read Bleak House it would be hard to find this interesting), but there are much better biographies of his entire life or of another turning point year, the one in which he wrote A Christmas Carol, of even Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. But if you’re a big Dickens fan you’ll want to read this one too....more
My children and I listened to this fast-paced audiobook that started with a mini-biography of John F Kennedy, his rise to power, and his Presidency wiMy children and I listened to this fast-paced audiobook that started with a mini-biography of John F Kennedy, his rise to power, and his Presidency with capsule summaries/context for all of the major events and then went into a reliable, not overhyped, minute-by-minute and eventually second-by-second version of the split screen as Lee Harvey Oswald plans for the assassination and John F Kennedy walks right into it. Swanson does the days following the assassination, the LBJ oath of office, the killing of Oswald, the funeral, and then ends by reflecting on the mystery of Oswald's motives. Overall Swanson is 100% on the lone gunman theory, treats it as a series of chance events that led to it, and mostly views it as someone wanting attention but never renders a definitive judgment.
Overall, Swanson hews closely to history, I personally learned very little but was still never bored in the relatively short narrative, and my children learned a huge amount not just about the assassination but also the global and domestic context.
And family content warning: the description of the assassination itself is *very* gory and many children may be disturbed by it. In fact, many adults. In fact I would be worried about anyone that was not disturbed....more
I had never read this before but no one was waiting for me to say that it is, indeed, excellent. In many ways the story is familiar (not least becauseI had never read this before but no one was waiting for me to say that it is, indeed, excellent. In many ways the story is familiar (not least because I read the magisterial biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom) and it also follows many of the familiar contours of slave narratives and escapes. But it is so well told, so insightful and sympathetic, when it is unsympathetic it is even more powerful, and with William Lloyd Garrison's excellent introduction and the conclusion which in some respects is still in the middle of the story, that heightens its power.
I listened to the audio version narrated by Raymond Hearn and would highly recommend that recording....more
The first two-thirds of this book is an extraordinary biography of John Maynard Keynes that is the basis of my five star review. It is well written, nThe first two-thirds of this book is an extraordinary biography of John Maynard Keynes that is the basis of my five star review. It is well written, nuanced, comprehensive, and does an excellent job explaining the complicated international finance of the period in which he lived. Zachary Carter makes compelling links between the many phases and facets of Keynes’ life: someone helping the Treasury finance to the Great War vs. returning the critical roots of the Bloomsbury group; a truth teller who wants to shout his views from the rooftops vs. a man who wants to be engaged at the highest levels; a columnist writing for the moment vs. a timeless theoretician; an avid speculator in markets who was generally hostile to speculation; etc. The life and the work fit together, which for a life and work this extraordinary is a challenge.
Carter places Keynes squarely in the tradition of a broader political philosophy, situating his work as a commentary on social and political power and the ways in which the market can only exist as a function of the state, pulling him out of the technocratic economic interpretation. He argues that Keynes’ masterwork, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is one of the great works of Western letters, a masterpiece of social and political thought that belongs with the monuments left by Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx. It is a theory of democracy and power, of psychology and historical change, a love letter to the power of ideas.” But Carter also argues, in some tension with this claim, that Keynes had pretty much worked out his ideas before the General Theory and was just using it as a rhetorical device to persuade in the present and influence posterity.
My only quibble about the first two-thirds of the book is that it overplays Keynes as columnist a bit and underplays Keynes as intellectual. His relationships with Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his early writing on probability are all mentioned but not emphasized as much as I might have liked.
But then Keynes dies on page 367 and the next 166 pages at times read like they were written by someone who had never read or absorbed the first 367 pages. These pages are a partial and polemical account of economic ideas and economic policy in the postwar United States, basically a long indictment of how Keynes was mathematicalized and marginalized within economics and how policymaking abandoned his ideas too. This part makes some interesting points and I learned from it, but the closer it got the present the more tendentious and polemical it got.
Let me list a few concerns:
SHOULD WE CARE WHAT KEYNES WOULD HAVE THOUGHT? The justification for including the last third was a biography of the afterlife of Keynes ideas. Carter is constantly telling us what Keynes would have thought of, say, various compromises made by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. For some reason biographers of Charles Dickens rarely feel compelled to provide his reviews of 20th century literature, biographers of Isaac Newton don’t speculate about what he would have thought of quasars, and I don’t find myself seeking out articles about what Charles Darwin would have thought of COVID. Maybe a philosopher is aspiring to timeless truths so it might make sense to ask what Kant or Mill would think of an ethical question, but the Keynes portrayed in the first two-thirds of this book is a man of the moment, someone whose ideas are pragmatic, and constantly changing. If someone changes their mind once a decade—and often holds contradictory opinions at the same time—how exactly can we extrapolate their views into the future? Carter thinks Keynes would have been opposed to the WTO and Long-term Capital Management, I would have bet he would have been pro the former and on both sides of the later, but who cares.
THE NARROW FOCUS ON THE UNITED STATES IS OVERLY PAROCHIAL. Carter’s story shifts entirely to the United States after World War II. This makes the story very specific to US debates and miss out on broader themes. For example, the divergence of German and US thought on fiscal policy is large and important in putting some perspective on where Keynes’ legacy has persisted and where it has been absent. And Carter does a lot of criticism of NAFTA, the WTO and China’s accession to the WTO as evidence of the ascent of neoliberalism and the betrayal of Keynes (see previous point for why I do’t know where Keynes would have stood on those, especially when he held multiple positions on tariffs over the course of his career). But if Carter had looked at the attitudes of social democratic countries in Europe towards trade, including trade with China, it would have seen less of an exemplar of neoliberalism.
“NEOLIBERALISM” AS AN OVERLY BROAD EPITHET FOR EVERYTHING CARTER DOES NOT LIKE. Carter is critical of Kennedy for cutting the top tax rate from 91 to 70 percent and Carter for his deregulation. You can think the top rate should be much higher than it is or that environmental regulation should be much tougher while also thinking those were moves in the right direction. And then there is my least favorite sentence in the book: "Improving education, for instance, probably helped at the margins by creating more jobs for teachers. But the ultimate result was a better-educated underclass just as poor as the one that preceded it."
A ONE-SIDED NEGATIVE VIEW OF ECONOMIC HISTORY AND PROGRESS. In “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” Keynes famously predicted that productivity increases would enable future generations to work fifteen hour weeks while maintaining a good standard of living. Carter explains the failure of this prediction: “The tremendous expansion of output and productivity over the past ninety years has been harvested for the most part by a very small section of society. For everyone else, economic prospects are roughly where they were in the mid-1920s.” The problems with this explanation: (1) hours have stayed high and risen more for the highest-income workers; (2) inequality has not increased since Keynes wrote it in 1930 and moreover you see people working 40+ hour weeks in countries with much lower inequality; and (3) economic prospects are vastly better than where they were in the 1930s. The same argumentation shows up again in multiple places (e.g., misleadingly missing the *percentage* decline in absolute poverty in the 1990s because he focuses on the level and then belittling the subsequent decline because many are still living in near poverty).
OVERLY ATTRIBUTES THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS TO MATERIAL INTERESTS AND FUNDING. There is no doubt that funding of ideas, organized groups like the Mont Pelerin society, and the like, have had an impact. But a lot of the development of ideas over the last 70 years has been based on what could explain more, what had evidence, what theories failed. Milton Friedman’s expectations-augmented Philips curve came out of a failure of the traditional Philips curve. Paul Samuelson’s textbook was successful in large part because it effectively unified a set of ideas. Not all math is obfuscation and, in fact, as Carter himself acknowledges, “Without those luminaries [Samuelson et al], The General Theory would today be an intellectual curiosity, the brilliant and confusing work of an influential Englishman that had briefly animated the Roosevelt administration.”
A NARROW VIEW OF ECONOMICS. In Carter's telling Keynesianism was largely dead when Jimmy Carter embraced deregulation. He writes, "Without a patron in Washington, up-and-coming economists pursued other ideas. The dwindling few who continued to hold out against the storm—Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz—were Samuelson disciples from MIT who treated Galbraith with professional disdain." A few of the issues: (1) Krugman and Stiglitz, at the time, were primarily microeconomists and not overly engaged in the macroeconomic debate around Keynes; (2) much of the trajectory of economic research has nothing to do with patrons in Washington (see the previous point); and (3) there was a huge growth in the economics of imperfect information, behavioral economics, the shift to empirical study of issues like the impact of the minimum wage on employment, all of which were moving much of economics in a direction with a richer understanding of market failures, human behavior, and in many cases a greater agnosticism on these issues as empirical research replaced theory. But in Carter's version of economics there are only a few celebrity economists and the notion of market failures and behavior is highly limited.
This is a partial list of my concerns with the last third of the book. Even in that part I learned a lot, especially the debates with John Kenneth Galbraith, Joan Robinson, the intersection of Macarthyism and economics, and more. I just wish it had ended up being a standalone book that had the sensitivity, nuance and thoughtfulness that pervaded every page of their spectacular biography of John Maynard Keynes....more
The second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audioboThe second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audiobook of the Peter Ackroyd play The Mystery Of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson extensively uses the words and works of Charles Dickens to tell elements of his life story and character and how they fused with his writing. And like the other Mystery, A.N. Wilson's enthusiasm for a writer he has clearly loved, read and re-read since childhood comes through on every page. It is not a chronological life but instead seven chapters each organized around a different mystery including Dickens' cruelty to his wife, his charity, his public readings, The Mystery of Edwin Drood itself, etc. As such, it seems better suited to someone who has read most of Dickens and has a basic familiarity with his life.
Occasionally the tendentious speculation that evidently (according to the reviews) has marred some of A.N. Wilson's other books shows up here. For example, he effectively asserts that Dickens' suffered his fatal stroke while having sex on a surreptitious visit to his mistress Ellen Ternan, who then put his unconscious body in a cab and brought it back to Dickens' house with all of it covered up by Dickens' family and household staff. Wilson doesn't name his source for this but it appears to be Claire Tomalin, perhaps the biggest authority on Dickens and especially Ternan, who in her biography Charles Dickens has both the conventional story but this one (minus the sex) with the major caveat: "It seems a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits." He also speculates that difficulty plotting out The Mystery of Edwin Drood killed Dickens. But, fortunately, there is relatively little of this.
Wilson is particularly strong on writing about Dickens' many ways of thinking about and presenting himself, his double character, the genuineness of his charity while depicting charitable hypocrites, his social commentary that often outdated, missed genuine solutions, but was powerful in its own rights, the role that public readings played etc. Ultimately Wilson argues that Dickens' grounding in pantomime and fairy tales made his books more real than the more "realistic" and journalistic fiction of his contemporaries and that it is his characters--not his plots--that have become immortal and inimitable....more
What a dream. A one man play about the life of Charles Dickens, written by Peter Ackroyd in collaboration with Simon Callow and performed by Simon CalWhat a dream. A one man play about the life of Charles Dickens, written by Peter Ackroyd in collaboration with Simon Callow and performed by Simon Callow. It tells the story of Dickens' life from beginning to end, including his personal life and literary evolution, largely through the relevant readings from Dickens' fiction but interspersed with some expository connective tissue. Spellbinding from beginning to end, I'll be listening to this again....more
A young adult graphic novel about the first female astronauts is by the team that wrote the excellent Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, A young adult graphic novel about the first female astronauts is by the team that wrote the excellent Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas and the author of numerous other young adult graphic scientific biographies, most notably Feynman. Primates was a much more unique and interesting book, weaving primatology together with the lives and using it to better appreciate the psychology and behavior of the human subjects of the book. This was a little closer to standard fare, astronaut training, launches, and the like, only focusing on the first women--including the obstacles they overcame, the ways NASA did and did not understand them, and a vivid recounting of what it was like to be on the first set of Shuttle flights. Relatively quick reading and passes the test of being worth the time....more
A fantastic biography that tells the tragically short life of Pushkin in short chapters that go chronologically from birth to death with an epilogue aA fantastic biography that tells the tragically short life of Pushkin in short chapters that go chronologically from birth to death with an epilogue about the evolving interpretation of Pushkin over time. The chapters cover both the life and the works, explaining the composition of each of his major works and many of his minor ones along with some interpretative commentary and contextualization.
What makes this biography by Robert Chandler (a translator and also editor of the great collection Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida) so good is that he rescues Pushkin from the layers and layers of meaning that have been thrust on him. He does not have him stand for Russia, representing the aristocracy or the people or anything else. Instead he is an immensely talented author, one whose path was plowed by a few lesser know Russian poets and foreign examples (Byron and Shakespeare, among others). He was never immersed in the major historical events around him because he was so focused on his own reading of history, his writing, his affairs, and more. This restores Pushkin as a writer and also as someone that everyone can have a personal connection to.
A particularly interesting aspect of Pushkin’s story, like so many Russian/Soviet artists (e.g., Bulgakov and Shostakovich) is his fascinating relationship with the Tsar, going from exile to personal poet, with the Tsar (pretending) to act as his personal censor, patron, but also humiliating him and perhaps contributing to his death.
Often the ~150 page biographies tend towards speculative interpretation or superficial recounting of events, this one suffers from neither problem and instead presents a fast moving, enjoyable and sophisticated story that is interesting in its own right and will help you better understand Pushkin’s works....more
A generally excellent biography of Balzac, but I would have been happy with a decent amount less detail. Graham Robb has an excellent feel for his subA generally excellent biography of Balzac, but I would have been happy with a decent amount less detail. Graham Robb has an excellent feel for his subject, his literature and 19th century France. It is a birth to death story that takes until about page 150 (of small print) for Balzac to write what was essentially the first book under his name, The Last of the Chouans, around age 30. over the next 20 years of Balzac’s life—and 250 pages of the biography—he writes what there is of the Comedie Humaine. Robb does a great job rescuing Balzac from some of the myth’s that have encrusted around him, showing how he worked (lots of coffee and writing about 30 words a minute from late night until morning), how he handles his debts, his travels, and his many different failed schemes for work as a printer, playwright and more. He also shows his relationship with Eveline Hanska in great detail, the nearly 20 years of correspondence followed by less than a half year of marriage. Remarkable, one-fifth of Balzac’s writing in the last five years of his life was to Hanska making it, as Balzac says, like another one of Balzac’s novels. What emerges is a writer who invented the concept of an overlapping work populated by recurring characters, more than 500 of them, and through revisions and re-revisions brought an increasing coherence to this fictional world, creating a form of realism that helped to rescue literature from the romanticism that pervaded it at the time....more
A short graphic, group biography of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by the author of the excellent Feynman. Conveys the sense of exciteA short graphic, group biography of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by the author of the excellent Feynman. Conveys the sense of excitement and the commonalities and differences in the experience of these three women who were all sent by Richard Leakey to study different primates in order to both advance inherent knowledge but also learn more about humanity. Like Feynman, Primates also does not appear to whitewash his human subjects in an effort to pander to children, instead portraying (some) of what seems to be the philandering of Leakey, the complicated marriage of Galidikas, the tragedy of Fossey, and the like.
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