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In the midst of Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, well-known biographer Sally Bedell Smith’s solidly traditional new life story of Queen Elizabeth II is a great pleasure. Smith approaches the Royals the right way, with hundreds of interviews with friends and associates, personal observation and thorough research into the historical record. The effort has produced in Elizabeth the Queen a book that ably blends a chronological account of the 85-year-old queen’s life with an inside look at her household, personality and private interests.

One theme emerges with great clarity: Elizabeth Windsor was thrust willy-nilly into her full-time job when she inherited the throne, but her true passion is horse breeding and racing. Corgis aside, she has always spent as much time as possible, given her circumstances, at stable and horse track, with considerable success. If you want to break through the queen’s reserve, ask her about yesterday’s most exciting race at Ascot.

More seriously, Smith convincingly describes a remarkable woman—not flawless, certainly, but with the discipline, intelligence, emotional balance and physical stamina to shine at a dauntingly tough job. Whatever their preconceptions about the monarchy, every one of her 12 prime ministers, from Churchill to Cameron, has come to admire her brains, knowledge and sound counsel.

Elizabeth’s record as matriarch of her own family is, of course, more checkered, and Smith doesn’t whitewash it—though her view of the queen’s various predicaments is sympathetic. Elizabeth accepted bad advice about her sister Princess Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsend. To some extent, she neglected her children to focus on her job and her husband (who emerges in the book as a more interesting person than one might have realized). And from beginning to end, she mishandled Princess Diana. But she was capable of learning along the way, and seems to be a more successful royal grandmother than she was a royal mother.

As Elizabeth approaches her Diamond Jubilee—60 years on the throne in 2012—Smith is able to make an overall judgment about this second Elizabethan Age, and her assessment is positive. Elizabeth has weathered the storms; the monarchy is as popular among the British as it has ever been. And that, says Smith, can be credited to the queen’s “steadfast determination and clarity of purpose.”

In the midst of Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, well-known biographer Sally Bedell Smith’s solidly traditional new life story of Queen Elizabeth II is a great pleasure. Smith approaches the Royals the right way, with hundreds of interviews with friends and associates, personal observation and thorough research…

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An admiring Henry Kissinger noted in 1979 that “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” The origins of what became known as America’s Cold War policy of “containment” began with Kennan’s “long telegram” from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946 to his superiors in Washington. A much larger audience read his essay dealing with the same subject, in which the author was identified only as “Mr. X,” in the June 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs.

The 5,000-word telegram was provoked by a speech by Josef Stalin. The Soviet dictator congratulated his army, party, government, nation and, by implication, himself, on winning World War II. He only briefly mentioned his British and American allies and talked of increasing industrial production in his country because of capitalism’s tendency to produce conflict, as, he said, it had in 1914 and 1939.

Kennan, officially second in command at the embassy, was temporarily in charge as Ambassador Averell Harriman had departed and a new ambassador had not yet arrived. A keen observer of events in the U.S.S.R., steeped in Russian history and literature, as well as Marxist-Leninist ideology, Kennan’s telegram contained a brilliant analysis of where the U.S.S.R. government stood and what strategy could be devised to combat it peacefully. What came to be known as the “containment” policy was interpreted in different ways by others over the years. In his memoirs Kennan lamented that it had been applied to “situations to which it has, and can have, no proper relevance.”

The telegram was only one aspect of an incredibly long and productive life. Among other achievements, Kennan played a key role in the formation of the Marshall Plan and later served as U.S. ambassador to both the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia. As a policy strategist at the highest levels of government, he often disagreed with his colleagues. Later, as what we would today call a public intellectual, he was often critical of U.S. foreign policy and American culture. One of the lingering paradoxes of Kennan’s life was that he understood the Soviet Union better than he did the United States.

With such a distinguished career as a diplomat it may come as a surprise that, at least as early as 1934, Kennan wanted to become a writer. As noted Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis points out in his outstanding and surely definitive biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life, when Kennan was a student at Princeton University, “Literature, inside and outside of class, sparked [his] greatest interest, especially contemporary American novels.” Just as he was graduating, The Great Gatsby was published and, Kennan said later, “it went right into me and became part of me.” Kennan did go on to become an acclaimed author with two volumes of memoirs and works of history such as Russia Leaves the War. He received two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards and the Bancroft Prize for his literary works.

Gaddis began working on this book almost 30 years ago. He conducted many interviews with Kennan, who lived to be 101 and died in 2005, members of his family and former colleagues. He was given access to Kennan’s papers, including his diaries, even a diary of Kennan’s dreams. Poetry by Kennan is included. Kennan understood that the book would not be published until after his death.

Kennan was a complex personality, and Gaddis does a masterful job of sifting through diaries and letters and recollections of those around him to establish what his true feelings may have been at any particular time. The biographer singles out three aspects of Kennan’s character which began to take shape when he was a young diplomat and would be retained for the rest of his life. One was his professionalism, both as a diplomat and as a historian. Secondly, there was a cultural pessimism (could what he regarded as “Western civilization” survive the challenges to it from outside forces and its own internal contradictions?). Thirdly, there was personal anguish and self-doubt. Gaddis also discusses his subject’s personal religious faith and is very good at showing what a stabilizing force Kennan’s wife, Annelise, was in his sometimes tumultuous life.

This excellent work brings us as close as we are likely to get to the life of an important American foreign policy strategist and historian.

An admiring Henry Kissinger noted in 1979 that “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” The origins of what became known as America’s Cold War policy of “containment” began with Kennan’s “long telegram”…

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal failings. The result is an engaging, clear-eyed account of a most complex writer and man.

Tomalin gives each of Dickens’ biographical personae its due: We meet the child-laborer son of a bankrupt father, the energetic and talented young man sketching sympathetic portraits of London workers, the actor and performer, the champion of the poor and finally the writer, dipping his head in cold water to keep working through the night. Dickens’ preternatural energy as an author—seen in his ability to write two novels, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, simultaneously for monthly serial publication—and his lifelong concern for the underdog brought him acclaim, wealth and enthusiastic readers in both England and America.

Haunted, however, by his lonely and impoverished childhood, Dickens could also drive a hard bargain, alienating friends and publishers in his single-minded pursuit of financial security. And despite claiming that his marriage to Catherine Dickens was unhappy, he nonetheless fathered 10 children in 20 years by her, increasing the domestic and financial stresses he felt so keenly. His attraction to innocent girl-women resulted not only in the creation of impossibly virtuous characters like Little Dorrit, but also in an abiding interest in London prostitutes.

Dickens’ affair with Ternan ultimately tore apart his family and dissolved some of his professional relationships. Tomalin carefully and fairly considers the evidence for the birth and death of an illegitimate child born to the couple, shedding light on a biographical secret that went unspoken for decades. In doing so, she brings the light and dark of Dickens’ personality into focus, the virtue he pursued and the vice that bedeviled him.

Tomalin’s Charles Dickens is a masterful balancing act, presenting the great artist as a fallible human without ever losing sight of the miracle of his literary achievements and the generosity of his spirit.

Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin now turns her attention to Charles Dickens in a substantial new work. Building on her earlier biography of Ellen Ternan—the young actress Dickens left his wife for—Tomalin surveys the broad expanse of Dickens’ life, from his professional successes to his personal…

In April 2011, the Library of America permanently established Kurt Vonnegut, who died in 2007, in the literary firmament with its publication of Novels and Stories: 1963-1973, a collection of four of Vonnegut’s most popular novels and a selection of his stories, interviews and speeches. While Vonnegut might have welcomed this recognition, he might also have made light of it with his typically playful harpooning of all matters related to the literary establishment.

As Charles Shields’ crisply delivered and exhaustively detailed new biography, And So It Goes, makes abundantly clear, the enigmatic Vonnegut both relished and loathed literary fame. Writing never came easy for him, and in the early ’50s he struggled at it mightily, for he didn’t have a clear vision of the audience he wanted to reach. He aimed at both the high-paying markets, such as The New Yorker, and the lower-paying pulp magazines like Astounding Science Fiction, to which his writing was much better suited. In August 1952, Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, which introduced many of the themes that would dominate the rest of his literary output. In this novel, Vonnegut demonstrates his love of debunking fixed ideas and institutions that are usually treated with reverence: in this case, General Electric. His characters—as they were in the novels up through Slaughterhouse-Five, at least—are people struggling to avoid corruption and the traps laid for them by circumstance or the environment.

Drawing on interviews with Vonnegut—conducted mostly in the last year of his life—and his family and friends, along with more than 1,500 letters, Shields deftly traces Vonnegut’s life from his early grief over the loss of his mother, his struggles with his siblings and his recognition that humor could get him noticed, to his horrific experiences as a POW in Dresden in WWII and his quite meteoric rise and fall as a novelist. Vonnegut’s work peaked with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and, as Shields points out, the novels that appeared after this popular success were not nearly as well received nor as critically acclaimed, in part because these later books tended to bog down in autobiographical diatribes.

Vonnegut once said that he kept losing and regaining his equilibrium, and Shields dexterously captures the ups and downs of Vonnegut’s life and work in this definitive biography.

In April 2011, the Library of America permanently established Kurt Vonnegut, who died in 2007, in the literary firmament with its publication of Novels and Stories: 1963-1973, a collection of four of Vonnegut’s most popular novels and a selection of his stories, interviews and speeches.…

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Steve Lopez is a newspaper columnist somewhat in the mold of Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin. He’s worked in Philadelphia and Los Angeles – also with Time magazine – and has turned out a few novels. Several years back, Lopez came upon an L.A. Skid Row denizen named Nathaniel Ayers, who impressed him with his violin playing, despite the fact that his instrument had only two strings. Sniffing a story, Lopez set out to learn more about his new acquaintance and discovered that Ayers had been enrolled at Juilliard more than 30 years earlier. Lopez’s initial column on Ayers drew wide attention, and eventually spawned many more, as Lopez gradually became intimately involved in his subject’s past and future. The Soloist directly recounts this unusual, ultimately heartwarming tale, but not before the author takes readers on a harrowing journey through the tougher elements of both mental-health treatment and the lower depths of downtown L.A.

It turns out that Ayers, after indeed spending two years at Juilliard as a promising string bass player, succumbed to a form of schizophrenia, thus disrupting his functionality, destroying his ability to continue in music school and eventually spiraling his life downward into the underclass. Encouraged by some of his concerned Los Angeles Times readers and also by cautious but supportive psychiatric professionals and social workers, Lopez forges a friendship with Ayers and for two years helps him get off the streets, pursue his music with renewed vigor, and take the huge emotional strides necessary to begin a modest re-entry into more conventional everyday living.

Lopez’s writing is as propulsive as good fiction, and his central character is nothing if not a singularly fascinating gent – prone to disjointed stream-of-consciousness outbursts as well as brief informative lectures on classical music. Yet for all its positive-striding spirit, Lopez’s book is rife with suspense, mainly because Ayers’ complex personality problems emerge as all too real and – especially since he adamantly refuses meds – require unending patience on the part of those aiding his progress. The Soloist is inspirational but also very gritty stuff; a film adaptation starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. is in the works.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

Steve Lopez is a newspaper columnist somewhat in the mold of Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin. He's worked in Philadelphia and Los Angeles - also with Time magazine - and has turned out a few novels. Several years back, Lopez came upon an L.A. Skid…
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Robert Morgan is keenly aware that there are many ways to interpret the westward expansion of the United States of America. He concedes that much of it was tragic, yet, he recognizes the poetry of the westward vision of Thomas Jefferson and others who advocated for exploration and settlement of the West. In telling this complex story, Morgan follows Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “There is properly no history; only biography.”

In his fascinating, magnificent Lions of the West, Morgan, the author of such powerful fiction as Gap Creek and the acclaimed bestseller Boone: A Biography, gives us a fresh view of 10 men who, depending on one’s perspective, were heroes, villains or both. Besides Jefferson, the others are Andrew Jackson, David Crockett, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, John Chapman (aka “Johnny Appleseed”), Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, John Quincy Adams and Nicholas Trist. Drawing on his careful research and his exceptional gifts as a storyteller, Morgan writes with an enviable clarity that makes personalities, issues and events come alive on the page.

Thomas Jefferson, more than any other leader or thinker of his time, understood that the future of the nation would come from the westward movement—a view not shared by the Federalists, who felt that bringing in the Western territories would degrade the quality of the young nation. Morgan notes that settling the West diverted the country’s attention from the enduring and tragic dilemma of slavery. Jefferson, a prominent slave owner, idealistically reflected that if slavery were diffused over a greater area, perhaps it would die a natural death.

Morgan deftly interweaves the stories of his primary subjects as they interacted with one another and with others who played key roles in claiming the West. Old Hickory, as Andrew Jackson was called, was a mentor to James K. Polk, known as Young Hickory, a consummate politician. Obsessed with secrecy, considered duplicitous and spiteful, Polk saw westward expansion as a measure of the country’s greatness. By declaring war on Mexico in 1846, he would not only change the shape and size of the U.S., but “he would change the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch forever.” Another person close to Jackson was Sam Houston, the only man in American history to be governor of two states as well as president of another country, of whom Morgan writes, “Probably no major leader in American history ever veered more dramatically between extremes of failure and humiliation and victory and glory.”

One of the most compelling portraits is of the little-known Nicholas Trist, who married Jefferson’s granddaughter, Virginia Randolph, and served as private secretary to Jefferson, Jackson and James Madison. Intelligent and well educated, he was considered a failure at most things he attempted and is not remembered for the one great undisputed achievement of his life: He single-handedly negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the war with Mexico and gave the nation a third of the land that makes up the contiguous United States. Negotiating the treaty in the midst of war was difficult, but Trist earned the trust of the Mexican negotiators. His problems came instead from his own government. President Polk, for political reasons, had set the mission up for failure from the beginning and then officially recalled Trist just as the treaty was almost completed. But Trist decided to stay on and complete his work.

This authoritative and enlightening book engages the reader from the first page and holds our attention until the last.

Robert Morgan is keenly aware that there are many ways to interpret the westward expansion of the United States of America. He concedes that much of it was tragic, yet, he recognizes the poetry of the westward vision of Thomas Jefferson and others who advocated…

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The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions – each with decidedly different lifestyles – are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up) uncovers deeper similarities in The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, a refreshing dual biography that compares and contrasts the lives and works of these authors, both of whom held the same (dim) views of totalitarianism, morality and the future of our modern world.

At a glance, the lives of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh seem no more alike than chalk is to cheese. Though both were born in 1903 England into the same social class, their paths diverged as they were educated, grew to manhood against a background of world war, and pursued their literary callings (meeting only once). During his boarding school days, the sensitive Orwell was cruelly bullied (torture he later chronicled in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”). Waugh had a brash lineage (his grandfather’s nickname was “The Brute”), and was a schoolboy bully who would later habitually torment both friend and foe alike. Orwell, a socialist and atheist, chose a hard life of near poverty. Waugh, a conservative and an ardent Catholic convert, was an unabashed social climber who courted the moneyed, aristocratic echelons of British society. Waugh lived into his 60s, gaining early success as a writer; Orwell’s writings remained fairly obscure until shortly before his death at age 46.

The conceit of examining opposites to excavate similarities has driven many classic tales, and it is employed with deft honesty here, despite Lebedoff’s effusive fondness for these authors. The Same Man is a first-rate read, an adroit portrait of two prescient thinkers who feared, with the steady upward and so-called progress of the Modern Age, our collective fall into “a bottomless abyss.” Enlivened by Lebedoff’s trenchant observations of the authors’ inner and outer worlds, it is pulled down slightly by the final chapter, which strays occasionally into unfocused conjecture irrelevant to this biography’s worthy premise.

Alison Hood plans to re-read Animal Farm and Brideshead Revisited before summer’s end.

The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions - each with decidedly different lifestyles - are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up)…
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The spirit that animates – or at least haunts – Deborah Baker’s excellent account of the Beats in India, A Blue Hand, is not the spirit of its main protagonist, the troubled, sweet-natured poet-mystic Allen Ginsberg, but rather an elusive seeker, chanter of Swinburne and one-time girlfriend of poet Gregory Corso, Hope Savage.

Ginsberg left New York for India in the fall of 1961, after months of delay and indecision, propelled by a vision of God he had in a Harlem apartment years earlier. He was met eventually by his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and the pair joined poet Gary Snyder and his then-wife Joanne Kyger for some weeks in exploring India, while Corso (the one truly unlikable figure in this history), remained ambivalently, fearfully at home, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac followed other paths. Driven by unknown dreams or demons, Savage had long ago slipped the bonds of her eminent South Carolina family and of Corso and traveled by herself to Iran and Afghanistan. By the time Ginsberg arrived in India, she was already there.

Drawing with marvelous artistry from the papers and archives of Ginsberg and others, Baker presents readers with the manifold textures of the Beats’ inner quest – the dreams and nightmares, the drug use (which Ginsberg almost comically hoped would fast-track enlightenment), the personal and artistic rivalries, the poetry and the sometimes-numbing, sometimes-uplifting encounters with India itself. Baker, who was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for a biography of poet Laura Riding, wields here a scalpel-like pen: "Allen Ginsberg lay in a sweat-drenched puddle of self-pity," she writes early in the book. "He had so wanted to be a saint, but what was he supposed to suffer for?"

In May of 1963, Ginsberg headed home. According to Baker, "despite his passion for the idea of India, there was something improbable about Allen Ginsberg’s pilgrimage there. Unlike many of those who came after him, he neglected to leave much of his past behind. Instead, he brought most of it with him."

Savage, on the other hand, had cut her ties with the past and, it seems, absorbed the Eastern spiritual ideal of self-abnegation. Baker writes that she searched assiduously for Savage but never found her, not even a trace.

 

The spirit that animates - or at least haunts - Deborah Baker's excellent account of the Beats in India, A Blue Hand, is not the spirit of its main protagonist, the troubled, sweet-natured poet-mystic Allen Ginsberg, but rather an elusive seeker, chanter of Swinburne…

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From 1929 to 1934, Florence Wolfson faithfully recorded the details of her life in a diary she received on her 14th birthday – and what a life it was. A precocious, exquisitely attired Manhattanite with an artistic bent, Florence took advantage of every opportunity for adventure, sometimes flirting with scandal. She frequented the Metropolitan Museum of Art, newly opened in 1929; saw live performances by actresses Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontaine and Eva La Gallienne. She had a copy of the banned Ulysses and read Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga novels as they were published. Among her classmates at Hunter College, where she edited the literary magazine, were Joy Davidman (whose marriage to C.S. Lewis was chronicled in Shadowlands) and Bel Kaufman, who recalled “a young woman who used to appear in class in fawn-colored riding breeches. . . . How I envied those riding breeches and the exotic life she lived.” That life is presented in cinematic scope in Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary.

Koppel, a New York Times reporter, came across Florence’s diary in 2003, when she happened upon a Dumpster loaded with old trunks, vintage clothing and other unclaimed items from the recesses of her building, where Florence had once lived. Intrigued, Koppel tracked her down with the help of a 1930s-fascinated lawyer-turned-detective.

Florence’s life reads like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime in places, with all the famous paths crossed and situations experienced; while descriptions of city life recall Marjorie Hart’s Summer at Tiffany. Together, Koppel and Florence take readers through a world dizzy with new ideas, rhythms and inventions, but not immune to the effects of the Depression and later the coming of world war.

From 1929 to 1934, Florence Wolfson faithfully recorded the details of her life in a diary she received on her 14th birthday - and what a life it was. A precocious, exquisitely attired Manhattanite with an artistic bent, Florence took advantage of every opportunity for…
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In fleshing out the creator of Roget’s Thesaurus, writer Joshua Kendall faces something of a dramatic and structural problem: How does one enliven and sustain interest in a man who didn’t make his major intellectual contribution until he was 73 years old? The man in question is Peter Mark Roget, a physician by training and a wordsmith by choice. Kendall ties his chronicle together by demonstrating that Roget (1779-1869) was obsessed with classifying and list-making from early childhood onward. These habits of mind proved crucial when he finally decided the time had come to compile and publish his exhaustive list of English synonyms and their opposites (the term"antonym" was yet to be coined).

Roget’s life was not particularly exciting – even to him. True, he had a smothering, self-centered mother who eventually went mad, a rich and politically prominent uncle who committed suicide and a harrowing escape from French-held territory in 1803 after Napoleon resumed his war with Britain. But there were long periods during which Roget pursued his career only desultorily, seemingly indifferent to the cause that would ultimately immortalize him.

To compensate for the lack of intrinsic drama, Kendall amasses details of places and personalities that were significant to Roget, frequently drawing on tangential and recently discovered sources. Uneven as his personal life was, it is clear that Roget was unwavering in his fascination with science. He wrote and delivered papers on subjects ranging from anatomy to optics to improving the slide rule. Roget completed the first draft of his "Collection of English Synonyms classified and arranged" in 1805, but he did not publish it – and then in a much expanded form – until 1852.

In his epilogue, the author explains how Roget’s Thesaurus has survived as a reference book and valuable literary property (selling almost 40 million copies) despite the advent of online parallels and a withering criticism from author Simon Winchester, who maintained that the work made possible, and thus encouraged, an indiscriminate attitude toward word choices and writing style. Kendall correctly notes that this judgment demands too much from the book and too little from its users.

 

In fleshing out the creator of Roget's Thesaurus, writer Joshua Kendall faces something of a dramatic and structural problem: How does one enliven and sustain interest in a man who didn't make his major intellectual contribution until he was 73 years old? The man…

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Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) considered himself a man of three lives: one as an ethnic Pole born in the Ukraine who lived the early part of his life in what is now Poland; one as a widely traveled seaman; and another as a writer in England. A master of reinventing himself, Conrad occasionally applied his fiction-writing skills to autobiography. To further complicate matters, some of those close to him gave inaccurate accounts of his life. John Stape, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad and co-editor of two volumes of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, is the ideal biographer for such a complex subject. An intrepid researcher, Stape debunks some Conradian myths in his latest book, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad.

An orphan by his teens, Conrad decided to go to sea, inspired by sea novels and youthful rebellion. During this period he read widely and developed two defining lifelong characteristics: acute observation skills and a habit of living beyond his means. Of particular interest are Stape’s exploration of Conrad’s travels as sources for his later novels and stories; for example, his 1890 trip to the Congo inspired his most famous tale, Heart of Darkness. As Stape writes, “His experience of the depths of rapacity, inhumanity, and cynicism was to alter his views of life forever, and his contact with the climate permanently damaged his health.” Stape deals with the related questions of why Conrad became a writer and why he decided to write in English (his third language after Polish and French), dismissing Conrad’s insistence that he just sat down one day and started to write. Though Conrad’s extraordinary talent was recognized by many in literary circles early in his career, it would be years before he gained a significant readership. Conrad’s relationships with publishers and his close friendships with Stephen Crane and John Galsworthy are also discussed.

This authoritative and insightful book should be appreciated by all who enjoy Conrad’s work, as well as readers who like good biography.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) considered himself a man of three lives: one as an ethnic Pole born in the Ukraine who lived the early part of his life in what is now Poland; one as a widely traveled seaman; and another as a writer in England.…
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Don’t be misled by the silly title: Love and Capital is a serious and tremendously well-researched biography of a remarkable family who worked together to change the world. Karl and Jenny Marx were unlikely sweethearts—he a scruffy, volatile Jewish scholar and she the lustrous daughter of one of Prussia’s oldest and noblest families—but from their marriage in 1843 until the end of their lives they sweated and starved and suffered together for the sake of the dispossessed.

Their marriage was passionate but not always happy. Apart from their persistent poverty, brought on by Karl’s chronic inability to meet a deadline and the utter indifference with which his books were received once finally published, the Marxes endured constant illnesses, the deaths of several children and even a few moments of shocking infidelity on Karl’s part. Indeed, Karl Marx comes across as a bit of a cad in this story, the sort of tortured artist around whom everybody else must orbit. Jenny, however, is the real revelation here: an intelligent, sophisticated woman who remained devoted both to her husband and to his cause, despite the considerable sacrifices demanded by both.

Mary Gabriel tells their story with great empathy and verve, using the copious letters that passed between Karl, Jenny, their children and close friends like Friedrich Engels (Karl’s frequent collaborator and sugar daddy to the entire Marx clan) to illuminate what Karl called his “microscopic world” of home and family. Gabriel also provides plenty of excursions into the “macroscopic world” of 19th-century revolutionary politics, as well as some lucid explanations of Karl’s earthshaking ideas. In the 20th century those ideas would be appropriated more often than they were understood, but this fascinating immersion into the Marxes and their era might inspire some readers to give Karl’s own books a closer look.

Don’t be misled by the silly title: Love and Capital is a serious and tremendously well-researched biography of a remarkable family who worked together to change the world. Karl and Jenny Marx were unlikely sweethearts—he a scruffy, volatile Jewish scholar and she the lustrous daughter…

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Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Philip Fradkin (Stagecoach; A River No More) trains his literary eye on the physical, emotional and intellectual landscapes of iconic Western writer Wallace Stegner in a new biography, Wallace Stegner and the American West. A well-executed biography often utilizes a specific angle colloquial to its subject’s life and endeavors: Here Fradkin works a favorite Stegner literary device, synecdoche, as a pivotal conceit. The use of specific example to illustrate generality, synecdoche is employed while the biographer visualizes Stegner’s life as “the vista from which to gaze upon the panorama of the American West in the twentieth century.” This grand gesture has the remarkable effect of putting the panoply of the western frontier in the background; pushed forward is a meditative, focused homage to the vital synergy between man and place.

Wallace Stegner was born in Iowa in 1909, the son of “a wandering boomer” father and a mother who longed for domestic permanence. Of his childhood, the eminent novelist, teacher and conservationist stated: “I was born on wheels. I know the excitement of newness and the relief when responsibility has been left behind. But I also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness.” For Stegner, that hunger was a raw unease that birthed a lifelong, deep connection with place, a fusion that dominated his literary, academic and activist pursuits. Fradkin investigates the writer’s life from Stegner’s youthful days on a bleak Saskatchewan plain and in the more hospitable environs of Utah; as a groundbreaking Stanford professor; a controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (for Angle of Repose) and a man passionate about wilderness preservation.

Fradkin’s journalistic objectivity largely balances this work, however his emotional involvement with and respect for Stegner (though he met him only once) impart a glancing instability, resulting in an overlong defense against the accusations of plagiarism leveled at Stegner for Angle of Repose, and a slightly cloying epilogue. Overall, this is an engaging, holistic recounting of a rich, rough-and-tumble literary life, anchored in the rugged Western terrain, a fast-vanishing wilderness that Stegner would say we must preserve for our very sanity, a landscape crucial to our human “geography of hope.” Alison Hood writes from the urban wilderness of northern California.

Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Philip Fradkin (Stagecoach; A River No More) trains his literary eye on the physical, emotional and intellectual landscapes of iconic Western writer Wallace Stegner in a new biography, Wallace Stegner and the American West. A well-executed biography often utilizes a specific…

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