Literate, lucent, and well researched: a fascinating glimpse into how artists respond as the world explodes around them. (44...
Did Anton Chekhov’s niece, a major Nazi film star, spy for Mother Russia during WWII? Yes and no, concludes the author of several previous works about Soviet-German conflict.
Beevor (The Fall of Berlin, 2002, etc.) begins with a startling moment in 1945. The Germans have surrendered, the war in Europe is over, and the Moscow Art Theatre is presenting The Cherry Orchard, featuring the playwright’s aging widow in her signature role of Ranyevskaya. Taking her bows, the actress sees her niece, Nazi film queen Olga Chekhova (1897–1980), waving at her from the audience. What is she doing there? Beevor then rehearses some family history and introduces us to his other characters. Prominent among them are the playwright’s nephew, Misha Chekhov, a gifted actor briefly married to Olga, and her brother, Lev Knipper, before the war a promising composer and during the war a crafty agent and trainer of Soviet alpine forces. In 1921, the divorced Olga fled the murderous Russian civil war for Berlin, her advent coinciding nicely with the rise of German cinema. Her career skyrocketed (Beevor appends a lengthy and impressive list of her films), and she even partied with Chaplin in Hollywood. But after the Nazis took power in the 1930s, Olga found herself playing a particularly unsavory role, with Hitler, Goebbels, et al., as the creepiest of costars. She struggled throughout the war to protect herself, her career, and her family, but Beevor believes she probably did not spy much in any traditional sense, though her relatively comfortable postwar life in West Germany certainly raised eyebrows. The author knows his way around the relevant archives and had access to knowledgeable folks (he interviewed one of Olga ’s Nazi lovers), but he concludes that none of this material can provide an entire answer to the question of what services Olga might have given to the Soviets.
Literate, lucent, and well researched: a fascinating glimpse into how artists respond as the world explodes around them. (44 b&w illustrations, not seen; 1 map)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03340-5
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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