Reviews by Benjamin Ivry
Alice James: A Biography
Jean Strouse
New York Review Books Classics, 400 pp., $17.95, paperback
“The Diary Of Alice James” (Northeastern University Press) is a moving account of a psychologically fragile Bostonian, born in 1848 to an overachieving family, a sister of philosopher William James and novelist Henry James. Brother Henry called Alice “rare and remarkable,” and Strouse’s literate and literary 1980 life story, now in a new paperback edition, sympathetically portrays her virtues as well as travails.
Finding a niche in the 1870s as a correspondence school teacher, Alice encouraged many women across America to lead intellectual lives at a time when this was discouraged. Of her students, she remarked: “They look upon (books) as something sacred apparently.” Less admiring of the facts of life, Alice wrote to a friend, decorously referring to kissing as “osculatory relaxations” and after listening to a pregnant woman going into labor at a British rooming house, she commented: “How my heart burned within me at the cruelty of men!” This thoughtful study movingly portrays a tormented, thwarted soul.
Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano
Walter Aaron Clark
Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $27.95 paperback
Modern Spanish composers who expressed the soul of a people in their music include Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla and Enrique Granados. Of these, the last-mentioned had the most dramatic life, due to his death by drowning during World War I after a German U-boat torpedoed the ship on which he and his wife were crossing the English Channel.
Granados, who died at age 48, left behind a rich panoply of compositions, which University of California musicologist Walter Aaron Clark, also author of “Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic” (Oxford University Press) and “Isaac Albéniz: A Guide to Research” (Routledge), skillfully explores. Granados, as performed by pianists Eduardo del Pueyo (Universal Classics) and Arthur Rubinstein (RCA), should not be considered morbid simply because of the way he died.
Clark tactfully addresses conspiracy theories surrounding the tragic death, including a far-fetched one, which claimed that England plotted the torpedo attack to lure America into the war. A compelling musical-historical panorama.
Tolstoy: A Russian Life
Rosamund Bartlett
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 560 pp., $35
Admirers of the 2009 biopic “The Last Station,” whose stars — Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer — were nominated for Oscars for their roles as Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and his wife, may be curious to find out more about the complex and contradictory character of the man. Abandoning his unique gifts for writing fiction, of which “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace” are the most famous products, Tolstoy eventually semi-renounced the world. Thereafter, he produced starkly religious writings, such as the short story, “God Sees the Truth, But Waits.”
How and why Tolstoy withdrew from the world’s pleasures is recounted by Rosamund Bartlett, translator of Anton Chekhov’s “About Love and Other Stories” (Oxford World’s Classics) and co-author of “Literary Russia: A Guide” (Overlook). Although lacking the literary elegance of the best Brit biographies, among which is Claire Tomalin’s recent “Charles Dickens: A Life” (Penguin Press), this account of the Tolstoyan trajectory is told in clear journalistic prose, matching the unadorned starkness which, later on, Tolstoy himself preferred.
An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper
Adam Sisman
Random House, 672 pp., $40
The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a specialist in early modern Britain and Nazi Germany who died at Oxford in 2003, is usually remembered for his over-hasty 1983 authentication of diaries supposedly written by Adolf Hitler, which turned out to be “grotesquely superficial fakes,” according to the West German Federal Archives.
Trevor-Roper’s reputation took a permanent hit, but historian and biographer Adam Sisman makes a plausible case for admiring Trevor-Roper’s other solid achievements, while not ignoring this major misstep. Among the former books, which ironically often debunk other forgeries, are “Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse” (1977) and “Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson” (2007). Trevor-Roper’s previously unpublished “Wartime Journals,” due out next January from I. B. Tauris Publishers, should further remind readers of this historian’s extensive and tangible accomplishments, if not entirely redeem his “honour.”
Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
Richard Rhodes
Doubleday, 272 pp., $26.95
As fans of classic Hollywood know, Hedy Lamarr was not just the sultry screen goddess of “Boom Town” (1940), “White Cargo” (1942) and “Samson and Delilah” (1949). She was highly intelligent.
Born Hedwig Kiesler to a Jewish family in Vienna, her family roots originated in Poland and Hungary. Lamarr was a brainiac, who toiled on scientific inventions when not needed on film sets. Biographer Richard Rhodes, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (Simon and Schuster), describes how Lamarr, assisted by a composer friend, George Antheil, concocted a wartime radio guidance system for torpedoes. It turned out to have myriad different applications in peacetime, making possible many omnipresent technical devices, such as 3G cell phones, Bluetooth networks and GPS systems. Some inventions she devised turned out to be losers, such as a “bouillon-like cube which, when mixed with water, would create a soft drink similar to Coca-Cola.” Sadly, it didn’t.