Impeccable scholarship, though it lacks Petrine panache. (16 illustrations and map, not seen)
Biography of the tsar who aimed the Russian head, if not the heart, westward.
Following up on Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998), Hughes (History/University Coll., London) returns to familiar terrain with a new focus: the life of the man who dominated the vast Russian stage from the time he inherited the throne at age ten until his death in 1725. Born in 1672 into a huge family (16 children), Peter grew up in a country far more primitive than the one he would bequeath. Russia had no schools or universities; 90% of the population belonged to the peasant class. Hughes characterizes Peter as striking in many ways. He was large (over six-and-a-half feet), curious, energetic, willful, practical, and organized—qualities he would retain until his dying days. He loved food, drink, practical jokes. He escaped from a passionless arranged marriage by packing his protesting wife off to a convent, then married the redoubtable Catherine, who would reign after his death. Although Hughes recognizes and emphasizes Peter’s accomplishments, she does not conceal his flaws and cruelty. Opponents were tortured, beaten, executed. Near the end of his life, he beheaded one of Catherine’s rumored lovers and presented her the capital relic preserved in a jar. Adhering principally to documentary evidence, Hughes takes us along with Peter as he attempts to revolutionize his country’s fashions (he favored German clothing), educational system, governmental bureaucracy, inheritance laws, and religion (he made certain the church remained subservient to the state). She also shows us Peter’s abiding passion for sailing and lets us see the tsar dressed as a Dutch shipbuilder learning all he can from the masters of the sea in the Netherlands. Another passion—never realized—was to eliminate corruption in the ruling classes. Hughes notes that virtually all of Peter’s specific initiatives are long gone, but he did make Russia a great world power.
Impeccable scholarship, though it lacks Petrine panache. (16 illustrations and map, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-300-09426-4
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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