Tag: biography

Day 283: My Alsace

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Cover for My AlsaceDuring a visit to Alsace several years ago, I was fascinated by this book, especially by the pictures, but I could only find it in French. Then, awhile back, I found it on Amazon in English.

My Alsace was written by Hansi (Jean-Jacques Waltz), a beloved Alsatian poster and children’s book artist who grew up in the late 19th century under German occupation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region of Alsace, which identifies itself as French, changed hands between Germany and France four times. In the German school at Colmar as a boy, Hansi only learned about the great Prussian victories and the defeat of Alsace in his history classes. He deemed this period the worst in his life and wanted Alsatian children to know that Alsace has a prouder history.

My Alsace is a selection from the history he wrote in 1912 and some writings from after World War I. The latter section of the book goes on to tell about the trouble he got into with the German authorities during World War I because of his jokes about Germans in the earlier book. He was originally fined and later he was given a year’s prison sentence for insulting a German officer. He published the latter part of the book in 1919 to celebrate the region’s liberation from the Germans.

Hansi’s drawings are wonderful. He was well known for his pictures of Alsatian villages, people in traditional costumes, and celebrations of Alsatian life from an earlier time. The text is amusing, although it is full of anti-German satire. Written for children about eight years old, it is also entertaining for adults.

Day 260: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

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Cover for Team of RivalsBest Book of the Week!

Doris Kearns Goodwin begins her examination of Lincoln’s administration by remarking that because so much has been written about him, everything might be thought to have been said. However, by examining his career in terms of the team he put together to run the country, she found much more to write about.

This team consisted of his rivals in politics. Edwin Stanton, who treated Lincoln with contempt on their first meeting and who Lincoln made Secretary of War, was griefstricken at Lincoln’s death. Salmon P. Chase, eternally Lincoln’s rival for the presidency and a frequent undercutter, was an extremely competent Secretary of the Treasury. William H. Seward, the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination that Lincoln won, was at first inclined to underestimate Lincoln but became his closest friend and advisor as Secretary of State. Edward Bates, the Attorney General, was a homebody who was not sure he wanted a public life and at first looked upon Lincoln as well-meaning but incompetent, but ended up thinking he was very nearly perfect.

Team of Rivals begins on the day of the Republican convention of 1860, in which, of the rivals who had some expectation of winning the nomination of the party, Lincoln would seem to have the least. Seward was the odds-on favorite, but he had made many enemies in the party. Chase’s overwhelming ambition for the presidency lead him on several occasions to ignore the warning signs that he would not be the nominee. Bates was willing to act if nominated but made no extraordinary efforts because he preferred his home life.

Goodwin’s narrative then turns farther into the past to trace the men’s respective careers. In this examination she shows how Lincoln cleverly set himself up to be everyone’s second choice for the Republican nomination.

The book follows Lincoln’s nomination, campaign, and stunning victory, but the bulk of it concerns the compelling story of how he put together a cabinet containing these men, who were not only rivals for the office but who were from different regions of the country and who had different views on the important issues of the day. He then managed to work with these men and run the country during one of its most difficult times. It was frequently rumored that Seward actually held the power, but Goodwin shows us that Lincoln was always in charge.

Through an examination of the diaries of the men, letters, and other sources, Goodwin provides us with the fascinating details of political machinations, the conduct of the war, the fights among the generals, the alliances and friendships, and the story of how several men, who began with no esteem of Lincoln at all, grew to respect and love him.

Goodwin’s book is one of the most absorbing history books I have read. Although it is long and takes awhile to read, it explains each issue in completely lucid terms and interesting detail. The most important thing I got from the book was a fuller understanding of Lincoln’s greatness, his humor, kindness, and magnanimity–and what a disaster for the country his death was.

Day 245: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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Cover for UnbrokenUnbroken is the incredible story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner whose plane went down in the Pacific during World War II. He and his pilot Phil (Russell Allen Phillips) survived many days on a small raft only to be captured by the Japanese and interred in a series of brutal POW camps.

The book begins with Zamperini’s childhood in California as an almost feral creature who was always in trouble for stealing and other mischief. His unconquerable spirit served him well through his travails in adulthood but caused problems for his parents and himself when he was a child. His unruly years were ended, or at least subdued, by his brother Pete’s interest in training him as a runner, as he had always been the kid who ran away from his pranks the fastest. Once Louie began to take the sport seriously, he became a very fast runner and began winning medals. Although he only finished 8th at the 1936 Olympics, he ran his last lap in 56 seconds, and his dream was to return to the Olympics and medal.

After Pearl Harbor Louie became a bombadier and made many flights in dangerous and ill-equipped planes until his B-24, known as a lemon, went down during a search for another missing plane. I was particularly surprised at how unsafe the planes were and how ill-equipped the men were when their plane went down. Their raft contained only some chocolate and a few flares, and its repair kit pieces were ruined because they weren’t kept in a waterproof envelope. The three men who survived the crash had no equipment to make drinking water from sea water and were reduced to attempting to catch rain water. They had no food except the chocolate (which one of the men ate the first night). Braving strafing by a Japanese plane, shark attacks, dehydration, starvation, and a typhoon, Louie and Phil survived more than 40 days at sea. The other man died.

Their raft landed on an atoll in the Marshall Islands, where they were immediately captured by the Japanese. At first treated kindly, once they were transferred to POW camps, they encountered unbelievable brutality. Aside from being routinely starved–while Red Cross shipments intended for them were stolen by the Japanese–they were forced into hard labor and regularly beaten. Louie in particular because of his ungovernable nature became the scapegoat of an insane, brutal guard named Mutsuhiro Watanabe.

About half of this book is devoted to the men’s experiences in the camps, with the focus on Louie after he and Phil were separated. Eventually, though, the men were saved with the end of the war. The rest of the book related Louie’s trials with PTSD and alcoholism and how he overcame those problems to live a productive life. The book ends with his accomplishments even in an active old age, including carrying the torch at the 1988 Olympics in Nagano on his 81st birthday.

Overall, this is an interesting book, but I found the descriptions of the brutality at the camps overwhelming. Although I am not squeamish by any means, I kept reading a few sentences only to have to put the book down. I read it for a book club, and the other members reported having the same difficulty, even skipping over complete sections. The writing was excellent–Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit is a favorite–and the story compelling, but the details difficult to absorb.

Day 237: Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan

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Cover for NeverlandDuring the past year I read Margaret Forsters’ biography of Daphne du Maurier, and I find that Neverland makes a fascinating contrast with it. Piers Dudgeon traces the history of the du Maurier family and speculates how their relationships with J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, adversely affected them. Several members of the family were indeed disturbed, but the question is, how much, if anything, did that have to do with Barrie?

Dudgeon paints Barrie as a sociopath without exactly calling him one. Barrie grew up unloved by his hypochondriac mother, who took to her bed with the death at fourteen of her favorite son David. Barrie was six at the time and was never able to attract much of her attention, even resorting to dressing up as his brother and imitating him to try to get her to love him. This behavior is indeed bizarre, but Dudgeon makes the first leap by alleging that Barrie must have somehow caused his brother’s death to have been so neglected.

The early life of George du Maurier is not similarly examined (George being Daphne du Maurier’s grandfather); instead, Dudgeon zeroes in on du Maurier’s experiences as a young bohemian in Paris. Du Maurier is best known as the author of Trilby, a novel in which Svengali takes over the life of a young woman by means of hypnosis and eventually ruins her. This novel is based at least in part on the experiments of du Maurier and a group of friends during which they repeatedly hypnotized a young artist’s model. Du Maurier apparently regretted this episode in later life, although he did not give up “mesmerism,” and what he called “dreaming true” (self-hypnosis) until he married, and he later returned to his experiments.

Dudgeon uses this background to weave the theory that Barrie–who admired du Maurier’s first book, Peter Ibbetson, a story about a man who can escape the bounds of space and time by “dreaming true”–was somehow rejected by du Maurier and took his revenge by purposefully befriending and dominating members of du Maurier’s family, causing changes in their behavior. There is actually no proof that du Maurier and Barrie ever met, although Barrie certainly befriended Sylvia Llewellyn Davies, George’s daughter, and her children. It is also clear that he “stole” her children. Both Sylvia and her husband Arthur died when the boys were quite young, and Barrie copied the letter that Sylvia wrote during her last illness requesting the children’s nanny and her sister Jenny to take charge of the children, changing “Jenny” to “Jimmy,” and thereby co-opting the children. Oddly, none of the du Mauriers seems to have objected to that, to which Dudgeon ascribes more sinister goings-on. Of those boys, only one seemed not to be at all disturbed by their upbringing with Barrie.

Modern minds will think sexual abuse, of which there are indeed some indications, but Dudgeon thinks Satanism, if that’s not an exaggeration. And here we get to Peter Pan, who was not intended to be everyone’s picture of innocent, irresponsible boyhood, but who Barrie intended to be a villain, a Pan or “demon boy” figure, a pixie who stole other people’s children, who hated mothers, and who killed without compunction. Barrie was good at hiding the antisocial nature of his work behind saccharine sentiments, but this depiction is indeed what he intended, and Dudgeon of course sees Peter Pan as a self portrait of Barrie.

Dudgeon presents a great deal of information about the various fates of the Llewellyn Davies boys, but he spends his final chapters on Daphne du Maurier, their cousin. Margaret Forster’s view is that du Maurier’s tendencies toward homosexuality (borne out by some affairs and statements by du Maurier herself) and possible affair with her own father colored her life and affected her relationships with her husband and children–that and an appalling degree of selfishness. But Dudgeon doesn’t think she was homosexual at all. He believes that she and her father Gerald, a well-known actor who appeared in several Barrie plays, were so overshadowed by Barrie that her “demon boy” self came out in adolescence and dominated most of her life, until she suffered a breakdown in her 50’s.

I am not criticizing this book for lack of interest–it is indeed engrossing. But Dudgeon hangs a great deal too much of his tale on the assumption that most of Barrie’s and both the du Mauriers’ writings were autobiographical in some way. Even if they were, many of the quoted passages can be interpreted in more than one way. Barrie’s submersion of the children into a fantasy life certainly doesn’t seem to have been good for them, and as I said before, there is some indication in his own writings of the possibility of child sexual abuse, but I don’t know what else can be said with authority.

Day 222: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

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Cover for The Hare with Amber EyesBest Book of the Week!

In 1994, the world-class ceramics artist Edmund de Waal inherited a collection of 264 netsuke from his great uncle Ignace (Iggie). De Waal decided to trace the history of the netsuke from the time they came into his family, and in doing so, to trace the history of the family itself and the times they lived in. The result is a fascinating combination of memoir, history, art history, and collection of musings on related topics, The Hare with Amber Eyes.

Charles Ephrussi originally purchased the netsuke in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ephrussis were at that time a wealthy family of bankers, originally from Odessa, who in previous generations had expanded their offices to Vienna and from there to Paris. Charles Ephrussi was not a banker but a noted art collector and critic, friend of Impressionists such as Degas and Manet, and one of the two models Proust used for his character Charles Swann.

De Waal attempts to understand Charles through an examination of his writings and possessions and through events in his time, particularly the effect of the Dreyfuss case on antisemitism in France. Charles’s work in art was an important part of his life, and in this section of the book I was struck by the connection de Waal makes between Japonisme–the interest in and collection of Japanese artifacts, with their focus on nature and everyday life–and the rise of Impressionism, which was considered revolutionary partly because of its focus on nature and everyday life instead of “noble” subject matter such as historical scenes or stories from the Bible or mythology.

In 1899, Charles sent the netsuke to Vienna as a wedding present for his younger cousin Viktor Ephrussi, de Waal’s great grandfather and eventual head of the Ephrussi bank in Vienna. De Waal traced what he could of the life of Viktor and his family, this story culminating shortly after the dual terrors of the Anschluss and Kristalnacht. During this time, everything that this branch of the family owned was confiscated by the Gestapo. In these pages of the book, de Waal does a better job of conveying the fears and anxieties of those times than any of the recent books I have read.

De Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth recovered the netsuke after the war. How they returned to the family is an incredible story that I will not reveal. Shortly after she returned to England with them, where some of the family had made their home, they traveled to post-war Japan with de Waal’s great uncle Iggie.

I have just supplied the barest outline of the fate of the netsuke, which provides a focus for de Waal’s investigations and musings, but the family’s story and the story of their times is fascinating and imaginatively reconstructed. The book is at once a meditation on and enthralling depiction of the life and times of an extraordinary family.

Day 210: White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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Cover for White HeatBest Book of the Week!

White Heat is an unusual biography that focuses on the friendship between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The book is unusual because so little is known of the daily life of Dickinson and much is known of that of Higginson. Brenda Wineapple has pieced together the story of their relationship from what is left of letters (Higginson’s to Dickinson were destroyed with much of Dickinson’s correspondence, but there are letters to others) and from poems sent to Higginson by Dickinson. Wineapple is the author of an admired biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Their relationship was almost entirely in letters. By the time they began their correspondence, Higginson was a well-known writer of essays on nature and politics but was even better known as an ardent and radical abolitionist and advocate of women’s suffrage. He ran guns to Kansas during the free soil days and helped encourage many women poets and got them published. Later, he formed the first African-American regiment in the Civil War. On the other hand, Dickinson had published one or two poems and frankly didn’t seem much interested in publishing more, but preferred to send them off to friends. She remained obscure and unknown, in her later years not even leaving the grounds of her father’s house in Amherst.

Dickinson initiated the correspondence by sending Higginson a flattering letter containing a few poems and asking him to be her preceptor–to tell her if her poems “sing” and to give her advice. Of course, she knew her poems sang and apparently had no intention of taking his advice, so it can be assumed that she wrote hoping to start a correspondence.

Although Higginson has been criticized as too conservative in his poetic tastes and as a bungler for his role in Dickinson’s legacy, part of Wineapple’s purpose is to rehabilitate his reputation, for he was in his own time a brave man of principle whose poetic instincts far surpassed his own abilities as a writer. He found Dickinson’s poetry both shocking in its unconventionality, especially of form, and breathtaking in its beauty.

The two remained friends for the rest of Dickinson’s life, although they only actually met twice. Their letters were sometimes flirtatious, but Wineapple convincingly suggests that most likely neither of them had any intentions beyond friendship and esteem. Higginson was married to a lifelong invalid and seemed to be too upright to consider the idea of dalliance. When his wife Mary died, he shortly remarried a younger woman in the hopes of finally having a family. Later, Dickinson became enamored with and probably engaged to a much older man who unfortunately died.

One purpose of Wineapple’s book is to show what actually happened to Dickinson’s poems after her death, when they were published in two volumes in an edited form, with grammatical, punctuation, and even wording changes by Higginson and Mabel Todd. Higginson has been excoriated for this, but Wineapple suggests that Todd did most of the editing, some of which Higginson strenuously objected to. Certainly Todd alone released a third volume of poetry that was even more heavily edited. Higginson seemed unaware that Todd was handling Dickinson’s poems (with her sister’s permission) as an act of both self-aggrandisement and of petty revenge against Sue Dickinson, Emily’s good friend and sister-in-law, and the wife of Todd’s lover.

Wineapple’s biography is engrossing and occasionally poetic in its own right. It is an excellent analysis of this unusual friendship.

Day 190: Open: An Autobiography

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Cover for OpenBest Book of the Week!

Those of you who know me will probably be surprised to see the review of a sports biography on my blog. I will freely admit that this is not a book I would have chosen for myself; instead, it was a choice of my book club. That being said, I found Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi to be extremely interesting and even touching.

In making notes for my review, though, I came across another problem–how to review a biography of a living, well-known figure except by relating some of its disclosures. For some assistance on this, I took a peek at the review in the New York Times, but they obviously had the same problem. However, a phrase in that review caught my attention. The reviewer remarked that from the first time Agassi first appeared in the sport, he looked like a deer in the headlights. Now, look at the picture of him from the cover of the book.

This expression is a lead-in to a story about a sad, sad boy who seems to have finally grown up into a mostly happy, contented man. His big secret, which by now everyone knows, is that this athlete, who is considered one of the best tennis players in the world, ever, has always hated tennis. He was forced into the game as a young boy by his fiercely competitive (and I would say, although he never does, abusive) father, a former Olympic boxer who never succeeded professionally but was trying to live his life through his son.

His fate was so predetermined that his father gave him a tennis racket to hold in his cradle, and when as a boy he found he preferred soccer because of the camraderie (he frequently remarks on how lonely a sport tennis is), his father made him quit so he could spend more time on tennis. The vision of Agassi as a small boy facing the machine his father had rigged to fire thousands of tennis balls at him at an unbelievable speed is a chilling one.

I was particularly outraged by the attitude of his father and other adults toward his schooling. Agassi is clearly an intelligent person. He can remember, literally, everything, but as he explains in the book, except in English class he had difficulty grasping concepts. He had to have them explained to him a few times, and then he could remember them. When you watch his farewell speech at the 2009 U.S. Open or any of his speeches about his charter schools, you can see that he is a thoughtful, reasoned, even eloquent speaker who does not need notes. I am guessing that he may have had some sort of learning disability.

I feel so sorry for a boy who needed help with his lessons instead of a father who regularly had him skip school to play more tennis. Later he was sent to a tennis training school at the age of 14 (a school that sometimes sounds like something from Dickens and other times like Lord of the Flies), from which he was allowed to drop out of school to pursue, you guessed it, more tennis. This “preparation” gave him no other recourse–he was forced to follow a career in tennis because he had no other prospects and couldn’t do anything else.

Open is about Agassi learning to grow up and make peace with himself. It is terrifically engrossing, and his descriptions of some of the games made me wish that I had seen them. (Actually, I watched some of them on YouTube.) He avoids any kind of self-aggrandisement. In fact, as the title says, he is open for the first time in his life. Although he expresses himself honestly, he does not use the occasion of writing this memoir to slam other people or tell anyone’s secrets but his own. His depiction of certain other well-known figures (for example, his marriage to Brooke Shields and his rivalry with Pete Sampras) is balanced, and it seems, fair. Finally, I found it touching to see how a person who grew up in such a harsh environment would turn out to be so caring of others.

Day 177: Below Stairs

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Cover for Below StairsThis is actually my posting from yesterday. We were having some internet problems.

Below Stairs is the memoir of a kitchen maid that inspired the series Upstairs, Downstairs. Margaret Powell worked in service in the 1920’s from the age of 15 until her marriage. She was an intelligent girl who could have been a teacher, but her parents couldn’t afford to support her while she qualified, so she left school and began working at 13. Later, after her sons were grown, she went back to school and passed her 0-levels at the age of 58, followed by her A-levels.

Powell began as a kitchen maid and worked her way up to cook, mostly through ambition and nerve because she never really received any cooking training. (You had to feel sorry for the first employer who hired her as a cook, because she admits she only knew how to cook vegetables!) Her memoir describes the conditions the servants worked and lived in, sometimes very bad; the work she had to do, including ironing shoe laces in one position; and the way she resented how servants were treated by many of her employers. Although Powell wanted to become a cook, as it was the most privileged job available to her, her biggest ambition was to be married so that she could leave the life of servitude.

The memoir is written in a conversational style, including quite a bit of scathing commentary. It is an interesting book, although Powell’s memories are mostly negative. She says that she had fun, but she only slightly mentions any amusements, focusing on the numerous snubs she received and the ridiculous things she was expected to do. Of course, this adds to the interest of the narrative. One employer was actually even a bit miffed at Powell’s own name (Margaret Langley at the time), deeming it too “posh” for a servant. Although the memoir is written at least 40 years after Powell worked in service, the experience still obviously rankles.

Day 174: Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire

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Cover for Pauline BonaparteI didn’t know anything about Pauline Bonaparte before I read Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire. I picked it up because it was by Flora Fraser, a noted biographer who specializes in 19th century women. (She is also the daughter of Antonia Fraser, the famous biographer.)

Pauline Bonaparte was Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest sister, renowned for her beauty. She lived a colorful life and is immortalized by a life-sized, nude statue by Antonio Canova that resides in the Villa Borghese in Rome.

The connection with the Borghese family is not one that they cherish. Pauline’s second husband was Prince Camillo Borghese. During their long marriage, they lived mostly apart, and Pauline entertained herself with numerous flagrant affairs.

In fact, Pauline’s reputation was dreadful. Napoleon’s enemies spread numerous rumors about her, even stooping to claim that her relations with her brother were incestuous. Not only did she not care, she encouraged that particular rumor to show how powerful she was.

Although she could be very charming, she spent most of her career manipulating infatuated men and intimidated women. Stories abound of her using generals as footstools, turning people our of their own houses, and so on. A particularly odd one was that when she was visiting an officer of the church, she made him cut a hole in the ceiling of his bathroom over the tub so that someone could stand on the floor above her and shower her with milk.

Although extremely jealous of the prerogatives granted her sisters (as they were of hers) and generally hateful to the Empress Josephine (she and her sisters held onto Josephine’s train during her coronation so that she could not move forward), Pauline’s most positive trait was her loyalty to her family. She was devoted, although not faithful, to her first husband, General Victor Emmanual Leclerc. When Napoleon fell out of power, she was persistent in trying to improve his living conditions and tried to get permission from the British to share his exile.

Fraser’s biography is interesting and well written. I found Pauline to be a fascinating subject, although not an admirable person.

Day 149: Hons and Rebels

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Cover for Hons and RebelsAfter reading the other Mitfords’ criticisms of this book in The House of Mitford, I expected a biography that was cruel and critical, but Hons and Rebels is mostly an amusing story of Jessica Mitford’s teenage rebellion. The Guinesses (authors of The House of Mitford and Jessica Mitford’s nephew and great-niece), who claimed that Jessica Mitford lied on several points, do not seem to have considered the common phenomenon that people who experience the same things frequently remember them differently, from their own frames of reference. A different recollection of an event in the far past (and in one case an apparent misidentification) is not necessarily lying.

I became interested in finding a good biography of the Mitfords after re-reading several of Nancy Mitford’s novels. I was curious about the kind of family that could have spawned children with such radically different ideas and such extreme characters. Unfortunately, at the time, I was only able to find a couple of biographies written by family members, this being one.

Nancy Mitford, of course, was a brilliant social satirist and author of several light comic novels–and not as politically involved as some of the other girls. Diana left her aristocratic husband, Bryan Guiness, for the infamous British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and was interred with him in prison during World War II for their pro-German sympathies. Unity Mitford became a fan and friend of Adolf Hitler and shot herself in the head the day that Britain declared war against Germany, but failed to kill herself and was mentally disabled for the rest of her life. On the other hand, Jessica as a teenager ran off to the Spanish Civil War with the socialist Esmond Romilly, whom she married. Later she moved to the United States and became a member of the American Communist Party and a famous muckraking journalist.

Hons and Rebels covers Jessica’s childhood, rebellion, later life in the States, and estrangement from the rest of the family. It is light and easy to read, and quite funny. It depicts Esmond and Jessica as extremely naive but equally unprincipled. Mitford does not attack the other family members, as I would have expected after the comments in The House of Mitford. If anything, she looks back at them all nostalgically. In fact, as I commented in my review of the other book, the Guinesses are more prone to attack and criticize the other Mitfords, particularly Jessica and Nancy, and try to mitigate the faults of the Mosleys and the fanaticism of Unity. The only biography I can find written by an unbiased author is apparently superficial and focuses on Unity, so I guess my curiosity about the Mitfords will remain unsatisfied.

Just a note for my consistent readers: I thought that by reviewing one nonfiction book a week, I would be able to continue to write nonfiction reviews indefinitely, but I have now caught up with my nonfiction reading for the past two years, which just shows how much more fiction I read. From now on, nonfiction reviews will appear as I finish the books instead of more regularly.