An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and another top-notch work from Damrosch.
A vivid chronicle of the passions of an 18th-century libertine.
Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) has been the subject of many biographies, based largely on edited and sometimes sanitized versions of his Histoire de ma vie, in which he recounted more than 100 sexual conquests, relentless travels, and a lifetime spent perpetrating scams and cons. Damrosch, an award-winning biographer of Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and others, offers a close critical study of the original manuscript and of supplementary texts that include hundreds of pages of unpublished works. The result is a nuanced, deftly contextualized biography of an adventurer, an opportunist, and a man of voracious appetites who was determined to free himself from all manner of repression. He was, Damrosch writes, not “just a bad boy, he was a particular kind of bad boy” whose sexual encounters were “opportunistic and [sometimes] disturbingly exploitative.” He engaged in pedophilia (though, as Damrosch explains, the age of consent at the time was 10), incest, and gang rape; claimed to have occult powers; and lost fortunes gambling. Born to actors in Venice, Casanova imbibed the spirit of the swarming, culturally diverse city. The major industry, Damrosch writes, “was pleasure,” and Casanova, drawn to role-playing, fascinated by cross-dressing, and an “instinctive improvisor,” thrived there. Damrosch hews closely to the narrative of the Histoire, testing Casanova’s version—and the analyses of previous biographers—against available historical evidence. Still, his portrait is not a corrective to what is already well known but rather an amplification. Although he states at the outset that “the story of a notorious seducer needs to be addressed frankly and critically,” Damrosch ably demonstrates his subject’s energy and intelligence, “the joie de vivre, the enormous risks and hair-raising escapes, the lifelong struggle to invent and reinvent himself,” as well as his impressive talent in creating a memoir “bursting with vitality”—an apt description for this beautifully illustrated biography.
An authoritative, richly detailed portrait of a fascinating historical character and another top-notch work from Damrosch.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-24828-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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