Tag: biography

Day 139: Abigail Adams

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Abigail AdamsI think Abigail Adams suffered from the fact that I had recently read David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, and Woody Holton’s book covers a lot of the same ground. This fact made me ponder a bit about how much a woman’s history is often treated as an echo of her famous husband’s. I am sure that not as much information is available about Abigail as there is about John, especially before they married, but I felt like these two books didn’t need to cover so much of the same territory.

The picture that emerges of Abigail Adams is of a well-meaning but bossy woman of strong views. Her feistiness had two sides. I know that people are captivated by the thought that she spoke her mind during a time when many women didn’t and behaved as if she had rights that she did not, but I had the distinct impression that on numerous occasions she would have driven a lot of people crazy, particularly in her attempts to manage her relatives. When, for example, Abigail interfered in John Quincy’s posting to Russia, he must have been very patient, or very angry.

On the other hand, Holton shows that Abigail was an expert manager of the couple’s property and fortune, actually more astute than John. She took upon herself rights that were not hers legally, from principle, and she stood up for what she believed.

I am not sure I understand the expectation at the time, but I was also struck by the fact that she made very little effort to move into or even visit the White House. I know that it was only partially built at the time and was more like a rustic men’s boarding house than the building we know today, but it seemed that John Adams spent a lot more time without his wife than was necessary, as Abigail also did not accompany him on all of his diplomatic trips. Perhaps this arrangement suited the two of them, but I had the impression that it suited her much more than it did him.

These comments are not a criticism of the biography as such, but here is one. Like many biographers do, I feel that Holton occasionally draws conclusions and makes generalizations based on too little evidence. Perhaps he is trying to avoid the problem of scholarly presentations that provide too much evidence to keep the material interesting, but if so, he goes too far the other way at times. I found myself thinking several times that he had not proven his point of view. At other times, he buries his themes in too much biographical detail. I think he was having difficulty keeping that vital balance between too much information and too little. However, Holton does usually manage to preserve a tone that is light and interesting, and Abigail Adams is certainly a compelling figure in history.

Day 135: The Sun King

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Sun KingThe Sun King is an interesting biography of Louis XIV and a history of his court, although it occasionally assumes a level of knowledge about French history that I do not have. It is also not terribly revealing of the personality of Louis XIV, who was apparently a very guarded person. For example, the book contains no revealing quotes from personal letters or anything similar.

I was interested to read that Nancy Mitford originally envisaged the book as a description and discussion of the architecture and gardens of Versailles rather than a biography, which perhaps partially explains the focus.

The book starts with the beginning of Louis’s reign, so there is no information about his early life. Chapters are organized around incidents during his reign rather than periods of history. The book describes the opulent court and details intrigues and power struggles within it. The chapter about poisoning was shocking. It is easy to see why the French court of the time had such a reputation for decadence.

The edition that I read (not the one pictured) is full of beautiful pictures of Versailles as well as sketches of the architects, artists, and gardeners responsible for creating the palace. However, there are no good pictures of Louis, presumably because none exist. He is always depicted as a tiny figure in large historical paintings of some event, so it was hard to see what he actually looked like.

Of course, the book is well written and witty. Although Mitford is best known for her humorous novels of sharp social commentary, she also wrote several well-received and thoroughly researched biographies.

Day 129: Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Mad WorldI found Mad World interesting, but I think it would have been very interesting if I was more familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s work. Paula Byrne’s biography seems to be mostly concerned with refuting statements and criticisms that were made about him, of which I was previously unaware.

The book traces Waugh’s life and career especially in terms of his relationship to the family who were partial models for the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited. The book describes just where the parallels lie and where they diverge.

Byrnes is at pains to refute the allegations that Waugh worshipped and toadied to the aristocracy and was ashamed of his own middle-class origins.

The book made me want to reread Brideshead. I found Waugh an interesting figure, although I couldn’t help feeling how boring and pointless the lives of many of his friends, who were hopeless drunks, seemed.

I apologize for my posts, which will be more sporadic than usual the next two weeks, as I am on vacation.

Day 119: Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

Cover for Daphne Du MaurierI have enjoyed reading Daphne Du Maurier’s books for many years, so I was interested to come across this biography by Margaret Forster. The main revelation of the biography is that Du Maurier struggled with bisexual and homosexual feelings all her life and always thought she was putting on a show of a normal life. She explained to others that she was two people, one with a female side–wife and mother–and the other with a male side–lover–that was the fuel for her creative energy.

The book examines Du Maurier’s life and works in terms of these feelings and how they conflicted with her roles as a wife and a mother. In fact, she seemed at times extremely self-obsessed and stunningly unkind to her children when they were young, as she was cold and immersed in her work. She was also unkind to her husband when he returned from service in World War II. By that time, she was living in the home in Cornwall that she never wanted to leave. Her husband “Tommy” Browning was asked to serve the royal family, which he had to do from London. He was obviously lonely, but she refused to move there or even visit. Instead, he made the trip out there every weekend for years after his strenuous, lonely weeks working for the royals. Until he didn’t. She eventually divorced him and later remarried.

The book also tells about Du Maurier’s long-time affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence and her attraction to Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her American publisher.

Du Maurier tended to hide herself in her Cornwell home while she was writing. Although she became more sociable as she aged and many people remembered her as a warm and funny hostess, she eventually ended up almost a recluse who was devoted to her own daily routines.

The biography is interesting and well written.

Day 97: The Mystery of Lewis Carroll

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for The Mystery of Lewis CarrollThe Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created “Alice in Wonderland” examines modern ideas about Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and attempts to debunk them. Jenny Woolf does a good job of providing evidence that his friendships with children, rather than being pedophilic tendencies as is interpreted today, were regarded by Victorians as innocent and probably were innocent. She also shows that the modern interpretation of his pictures of nude children was not one held by people of his own time, and that they regarded this pastime and the resulting pictures as harmless because children were considered innocent.

In fact, Woolf provides evidence that his friendships with young women were much more subject to question and talk. She posits that he cultivated a persona of being older than he actually was so that they would not be questioned, even though these relationships were almost certainly innocent as well.

Woolf depicts the Reverend Dodgson as a sensitive, artistic man who cared for his family and loved entertaining children. His position at Oxford did not at that time allow him to marry. A number of years during the time he was a young man are missing from his diaries and he refers to feelings of guilt in later entries, leading Woolf to conclude that something happened, possibly with a woman, that he regretted. Her theory is that he cultivated relationships with young girls as a return to innocence.

The book is interesting, but with a caveat. It is very short, almost shorter than the subtitle, but Woolf is so focused on one or two ideas that it often seems repetitive. A good deal of information about Carroll’s life is missing because he or his relatives removed pages from his diaries and his relatives destroyed a great deal of material after he died. Although this has often been interpreted as the family’s attempt to hide nasty secrets, Woolf is not convinced that there was much to hide. She blames a good deal of the current perception of Carroll on the initial emergence and misapplication of certain theories of psychology in the infancy of the science.

Day 79: A Mountain of Crumbs

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for A Mountain of CrumbsIn A Mountain of Crumbs, Elena Gorokhova has written an engrossing memoir about growing up in Soviet Russia during the Cold War. What makes it most interesting, besides the details of life in such a different environment from our own, is how, while misunderstanding many things about Western culture and not being brought up with an accurate understanding of history, even of her own country, she still learns to doubt what she is taught.

Gorokhova’s upbringing is fairly ordinary, although she is both slightly privileged (her family has its own two-room apartment instead of sharing with other families) and disadvantaged (she has to earn her own way by merit since she is not the child of a peasant). However, from an early age her interest in learning English makes her fascinated with the world outside the Soviet Union. At the same time, her cynicism and disillusionment with her country grows.

Most of the book is about Gorokhova’s inability to live in lock-step, both with the state and with her own mother, so that she always feels like she is lying. As she says, “they (the state) lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know.”

The book is beautifully written in the first person as if Gorokhova is currently of that particular age rather than as if she were recalling her memories. (For example, when she is telling about when she is five, she narrates it as if she is five.) I can’t completely accept this style of narration for sections about her childhood, because the thoughts she claims to have are too sophisticated for a small child. In particular, I am struck by one comment she makes about thinking something is ironic. Five-year-old children don’t have thoughts about irony–it’s hard enough to get teenagers to understand what it is. However, the same narrative style works very well when she recalls her thoughts as an older child and young adult.

(As a side note, I have to contrast the chapters narrated by herself as a child with Jennifer Lauck’s wonderful memoir Blackbird, which at the beginning employs a narrative style that is absolutely convincing as the thoughts of a small child, allowing the reader to understand things that the child Jennifer doesn’t.)

I have one frustration with the book. Gorokhova describes so many misunderstandings about American life and so much anticipation and anxiety about going to live in the States that I would have liked a chapter about what it was like when she finally arrived. Instead, the book ends as she leaves Russia and contains a short epilogue about her life more than 20 years later.

Day 67: Life Itself: a Memoir

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Life ItselfWriters of memoirs and biographies have the same difficult problem to deal with. There is a fine line between giving too much detail for the work to be interesting or not telling enough. (I once read a biography of Aldous Huxley written by his niece that told everything he did every single day but gave absolutely no insight into him as a person, for example, his opinions or the conversations he had with other people.) When you are writing a memoir, you have the additional difficulty of drawing the line between what should remain private and keeping readers’ interest.

In reading Life Itself, Roger Ebert’s memoir, I admit to feeling a little frustrated at times about the level of information provided while at the same time recognizing Ebert’s intent to be open. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a tell-all, because I think the world is unfortunately losing its sense of privacy, but although his memoir forthrightly confronts some issues like alcoholism in the family and his own physical problems, it seems to skip over certain periods of his life.

Ebert chooses an unusual organizational approach to his memoir. Instead of going chronologically (although the book is roughly chronological), he writes each chapter on a different topic, as if it were a series of essays. And perhaps the book originated with some of the blog entries and articles he has been writing for years. This approach made it sometimes repetitive and sometimes seem like little more than impressions and lists of things and people. Of course, it has some delightful chapters, especially the nostalgic ones about his youth.

Perhaps because Ebert is trying to protect other people’s privacy, aside from his family he hasn’t written very much about ordinary people in his adult life but a lot about the famous ones, which gives a bit of an impression that Ebert is a name-dropper (even though I don’t think he is). For example, although the information about his adult ordinary life is limited (though he writes a lot more about his life since his illness), the book contains complete chapters about famous people he interviewed only once or twice. You can’t help having the impression, time after time, that Ebert has really gotten a kick out of hanging out with famous people.

Again, this skewing gives me another reason to suspect that many of these chapters originated as blog entries and articles he has written over the years. Because of this aspect of the book, it may be more likely to appeal to people who are fascinated by everyone in show business than those like me who think famous people are just ordinary people who happen to be famous and wish everyone would leave them alone.

(As sort of an anti-intuitive “proof” of this idea, I point out the reviews on Amazon. The people who disliked the book criticize it for spending too much time on his childhood and youth, which I thought was the interesting part, and not enough time talking about famous people. In other words, they want even more information about famous people than he provided, whereas I wanted more about him as a person. Perhaps they don’t understand the point of a memoir.)

The chapters on Gene Siskel and Ebert’s wife Chaz are touching. The book is, of course, very well written. We have a lot of sympathy for Ebert’s condition–a talker who is unable talk–and come away from the book believing he is handling it with dignity and an amazing optimism. My overall impression of Ebert from this book was that he went through a lot of his life being pleased with himself for his own intelligence (and must have been extremely annoying to some of his teachers in school and professors in college) and the luck he has had in his career, but that–as he himself admits–he has finally learned later in life about what is most important.

This review sounds like I did not enjoy the book. I enjoyed it but also found it frustrating at the same time.

Day 64: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for River of DoubtIn 1913, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt departed on a trip up an unknown river in the Amazon with a party that included his son Kermit, Brazil’s most famous explorer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, and the naturalist George Cherrie. Because the trip was originally planned to be less challenging and also because it was provisioned (by the leader of a failed arctic expedition) with more of an eye to comfort than practicality, the party soon found itself in dire straits, and by the end of the trip Roosevelt was near death.

In The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, Candice Millard writes a compelling tale of this dangerous journey to a completely unexplored region, which ended by putting a 1000-mile river on the map of Brazil. In a hostile environment that the explorers found strangely lacking in food, they were at times very close to attack from the Cinta Larga Indians, who had only had a small amount of exposure to Brazilian rubber hunters–and that had been violent. The group also had to deal with boats that were unsuited to the rapids they encountered, disease, dangerous animals, and theft and murder by one of their party.

Whether Millard is explaining the scientific reasons behind the jungle’s apparent lack of food, the geology of the region, or the dramatic events of the trip, she writes with absolute clarity and interest. Although this book reminded me a great deal of The Lost City of Z, which I reviewed earlier and also enjoyed, I thought it was much more interesting and better written.

Day 53: The House of Mitford

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for House of MitfordMany of you may be familiar with the famous Mitford sisters from Nancy Mitford’s wonderful books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, thinly veiled novels about her own eccentric family. Last year, after reading several books by Nancy Mitford and wondering about the kind of family that could have produced such extreme offspring as Nancy the social satirist, Decca the devoted communist, Diana the fascist and wife of Oswald Mosley, and Unity the fanatical worshipper of Hitler, I struggled to find an unbiased book about the Mitfords. I thought I had found one when I located The House of Mitford, which was written up as the “authoritative Mitford biography.” It wasn’t until I was halfway through that I realized the authors, Jonathan and Catherine Guinness, were Diana Mitford’s son and granddaughter. In fact, any books I could locate about the Mitfords were written by the Mitfords, a prolific family indeed.

The book is certainly interesting and often amusing, and it provides a lot of insight into the 1930’s, an especially turbulent time in Great Britain, but it has its faults.

Although the authors deplore both the extreme leftist and rightist views of the family and point out how all believed what they wanted to believe, the book shows certain biases and likes. It is much harder on Decca’s communist sympathies than on Mosley’s Naziism, for example. We are invited to admire Mosley’s ideals and prescience, and yet the book almost ignores the fact that he tolerated his followers’ rabid anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, Decca is made out to be a liar in what she writes in her book Hons and Rebels about the family, while other family members are depicted simply as having selective memories. Yet when I read Hons and Rebels after this book, expecting it to depict the family in a cruel and critical manner, I found it to be more the story of teenage rebellion. Decca (Jessica) left the family at 17 and what she remembers is colored by her feelings when she left.

Nancy, seemingly the most harmless of all the famous sisters, is depicted as two-faced. Great efforts are made to deny that Unity was a sort of groupie for Hitler, when she clearly was one. Unity’s most famous act besides the photos of her at Hitler’s rallies in Nuremburg was to shoot herself in the head on the day that England declared war on Germany.

Nevertheless, the book successfully shows that despite all the family disagreements and bickering, underlying it all was strong family affection and unity. The book didn’t do much, however, to answer my initial questions about how an admittedly eccentric but not very political upbringing could produce such extremes of personalities and beliefs in a single generation.

Day 45: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The PossessedMaybe not many of you would be interested in a book like The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman, but as a previous student of Russian and also a previous literature graduate student, I found it very funny.

Batuman has written a book about her years as a graduate student of Russian language and literature that skewers many things, but particularly academic conferences with their absurd presentation topics and academic thinking, with the oblique reasoning process that sometimes accompanies it. For example, on the way to a conference on Tolstoy’s estate, Batuman loses her luggage and is forced to dress in flip-flops, sweatpants, and a flannel shirt. Some of the scholars attending the conference assume she is a Tolstoyan and that she has taken a vow to walk around in sandals and a peasant shirt for days. When she calls a Russian clerk to find out about her luggage, the clerk replies, “Are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”

While relating her adventures in studying, travelling in Russia, and living in Turkey, where she went because her grant was too small for her to afford a stay in Russia, Batuman muses on ideas from literature and compares the lives of the people she meets with the adventures of characters in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Her observations are colored with her own peculiar view of life, which poses that “the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love appear bound up with Russian.” In Turkey, when she is challenged by scholars to study Turkish literature, particularly because of her Turkish heritage, she concludes that no one reads it, even the Turks.

Batuman expanded articles she wrote for Harper’s and The New Yorker into this book, which is named after one of Doestoevsky’s more enigmatic novels. Although her musings are occasionally a trifle too erudite for me to follow (and perhaps my memories of Russian literature too rusty), I found the book amusing and couldn’t put it down.