There’s James Otis, lawyer and mentor to Adams, who became a verbal sparring partner and reckless troublemaker, increasingly unable to keep his mouth shut. There’s Thomas Hutchinson, Loyalist stalwart and Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who consistently talked down to and underestimated the colonists, pouring kerosene on the fires of liberty with remarkable tone deafness. The supporting players come to life as well. As Schiff writes, “With singular lucidity Adams plucked ideas from the air and pinned them to the page, layering in the moral dimensions, whipping up emotions, seizing and shaping the popular imagination.”Ĭormac McCarthy: A genius stares down the barrel of mortality in two new books In the 10 years or so leading up to the Revolutionary War he was a whirlwind of agitation, writing under countless pseudonyms in multiple publications, rousing the rabble on the streets and making himself a tireless nuisance to colonial administrators. Not to worry he had much bigger tasks at hand. As Stacy Schiff makes clear in her masterful new biography “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams” (Little, Brown and Company, 432 pp., ★★★★ out of four, out now), the man now best known for a beer brand was never far from the center of the action.Īdams actually ran his malt business into the ground. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.The American Revolution wasn’t a moment in time so much as a gradual drip, drip, drip, a series of events, grievances, provocations and confrontations that unspooled over a period of several years before finally detonating. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine-a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the twentieth century, the story of the Nabokovs’ fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. “Without my wife,” he once noted, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.”
Nabokov wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, and third for no one at all. Stacy Schiff brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time: Vladimir Nabokov, émigré author of Lolita Pale Fire and Speak, Memory, and his beloved wife, Véra. ONE OF ESQUIRE’S 50 BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME From the award–winning author of The Revolutionary and The Witches comes “an elegantly nuanced portrait of wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work.”-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
0 kommentar(er)
