The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
Edmund de Waal, 2010
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312569372
Summary
Winner, 2010 Costa Book Award for Biography
Winner, 2011 Ondaatje Prize
Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.
And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Nottingham, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University; post
graduate studies, University of Sheffield
• Awards—Costa Book Award; Ondaatje Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England
Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal OBE is a British ceramic artist, and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010). He has worked as a curator, lecturer, art critic and art historian and is a Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster, He has received several awards and honours for his work.
De Waal was born in Nottingham, England, the son of Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, later Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. His grandfather was Hendrik de Waal, a Dutch businessman who moved to England and from whom he got his distinctly Dutch family name. His grandmother Elisabeth was a member of the Ephrussi family, whose history he would chronicle in The Hare with Amber Eyes.
De Waal made his first pot at the age of five after persuading his father to take him to a ceramics evening class. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, where he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Bernard Leach. Aged 17, de Waal obtained a place at Cambridge University and deferred entry to take up a two-year apprenticeship with Whiting. During the apprenticeship he repetitively made hundreds of pots, such as casseroles and honey pots, telling BBC radio interviewer John Tusa, "It’s a bit like doing scales as well—you’d never be surprised by a musician spending five years doing arpeggios, and there is a sense in a ceramic apprenticeship that that’s really what you’re doing."
In 1983, de Waal took up his place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge to read English, being awarded a scholarship in 1985 and graduating in 1986 with first class honours.
Following graduation de Waal followed the path he had decided upon before going up to Cambridge: to make inexpensive domestic pots with good earth colours. He moved to the Welsh borders where he built a kiln and set up a pottery making functional stoneware pots in the Leach tradition, but the enterprise was not successful. He moved to inner-city Sheffield and started to work with porcelain, describing it as “the great taboo material; it doesn't do any of the 'proper' work of a pot. In using it I was trying to find a way out."
In 1991 he obtained a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship, under which he spent a year obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University and then another year continuing his study of the language in Japan. While in Japan he also worked on a monograph of Bernard Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum, and continued to make pots, porcelain jars with the pushed-in, gestural sides that were to epitomise his style.
Work
On returning to Britain in 1993, de Waal began living in London and made his distinctive ceramics, porcelain with a celadon glaze. Their shapes were essentially classical but with indentations or pinches and subtle variations in tone and texture. The pots became very fashionable, and in 1995 he had his first of many solo exhibitions.
De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach."
The great myth of Leach is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman.
He noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. These opinions attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.
His work remained broadly within the Anglo-Oriental tradition but he also studied the modernists, and the Bauhaus movement in particular. In visits to gothic cathedrals as a child de Waal had attended to small spaces within large buildings. While at university he began to consider how his work might help to re-order the interior space of the museums and art galleries he visited.
In his current work he has moved away from making single objects to the production of groups of objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Most of his work consists of cylindrical porcelain pots with pale celadon glazes. He believes that the East and West may meet in porcelain; for example, that there the ethos of China's medieval Sung Dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.
His family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance was published in 2010. In it he tells the story of his relatives, the once wealthy Ephrussi family, through the history of a collection of Japanese netsuke sculptures that are handed down through the generations. As he notes in the book, the collection ended up back in Japan, through de Waall's great-uncle Ignace "Iggie" Ephrussi, who settled in Tokyo in 1947 and towards whom de Waall felt great affection. The book received critical acclaim including the Costa Book Award (Biography 2010) and Ondaatje Prize (2011).
De Waal, who has made installations for Chatsworth, Kettle's Yard, Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, works and lives in West Norwood, south London. He is represented by the Alan Cristea Gallery, London and the New Art Centre, Wiltshire. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to art.
In October 2011, de Waal was asked to choose and describe music that inspires him in his work. Speaking about music he described how...
you can get yourself into the loops of music... I did a huge porcelain wall—500 porcelain vessels—and there are rhythms in that wall that completely come out of baroque music. More recently there’s installations where things are in very minimalist, black lead-lined boxes, 12 of them in a row with the same number of vessels in each but they're arranged in different ways. That’s the porcelain equivalent of Steve Reich's systems music! It’s the same notes and the same tones repeated and just slightly different each time and it only makes sense if you’ve got all of it. One of them by itself is just a black box with a few pots in it.
The playlist includes Keith Jarrett, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams and Franz Schubert. (Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The author was apprenticed as a potter…and his aesthetic sensibility extends to language: there is much wit and dramatic instinct to relish in these pages. But the intelligence and creativity with which de Waal constructs a family history are what make this special book so supremely winning.
Megan Buskey - New York Times
The Hare With Amber Eyes belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt, and Sybille Bedford's A Legacy. All four are wistful cantos of mutability, depictions of how even the lofty, beautiful and fabulously wealthy can crack and shatter as easily as Faberge glass or Meissen porcelain—or, sometimes, be as tough and enduring as netsuke, those little Japanese figurines carved out of ivory or boxwood.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post
At one level [Edmund de Waal] writes in vivid detail of how the fortunes were used to establish the Ephrussis’ lavish lives and high positions in Paris and Vienna society. And, as Jews, of their vulnerability: the Paris family shaken by turn-of-the century anti-Semitism surging out of the Dreyfus affair; the Vienna branch utterly destroyed in Hitler’s 1937 Anschluss.... At a deeper level, though, Hare is about something more, just as Marcel Proust’s masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As with Remembrance of Things Past, it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.
Richard Eder - Boston Globe
A beautiful and unusual book...[and] unique memoir of [de Waal’s] family.... De Waal has a mystical ability to so inhabit the long-gone moment as to seem to suspend inexorable history, personal and impersonal.... A work that succeeds in several known genres: as family memoir, travel literature (de Waal’s Japan is the nearest thing to being there, and over decades), essays on migration and exile, on cultural misperceptions, and on de Waal's attempt to define his relationship with his own kaolin creations. His book is also a new genre, unnamed and maybe unnameable.
Veronica Horwell - Guardian (UK)
(Book of the Year.) From a hard and vast archival mass of journals, memoirs, newspaper clippings and art-history books, Mr. de Waal has fashioned, stroke by minuscule stroke, a book as fresh with detail as if it had been written from life, and as full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver. Buy two copies of his book; keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend.
Economist
In this family history, de Waal, a potter and curator of ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, describes the experiences of his family, the Ephrussis, during the turmoil of the 20th century. Grain merchants in Odessa, various family members migrated to Vienna and Paris, becoming successful bankers. Secular Jews, they sought assimilation in a period of virulent anti-Semitism. In Paris, Charles Ephrussi purchased a large collection of Japanese netsuke, tiny hand-carved figures including a hare with amber eyes. The collection passed to Viktor Ephrussi in Vienna and became the family's greatest legacy. Loyal citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Vienna Ephrussis were devastated by the outcome of WWI and were later driven from their home by the imposition of Nazi rule over Austria. After WWII, they discovered that their maid, Anna, had preserved the netsuke collection, which Ignace Ephrussi inherited, and he settled in postwar Japan. Today, the netsuke reside with de Waal (descended from the family's Vienna branch) and serve as the embodiment of his family history. A somewhat rambling narrative with special appeal to art historians, this account is nonetheless rich in drama and valuable anecdote.
Publishers Weekly
A duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony (Boston Globe), de Waal's extraordinary family memoir brings his forebears vibrantly to life. To augment his research, de Waal visited his surviving relatives and toured his ancestors' palatial homes, and these intimate explorations, relayed in self-assured and unsentimental prose, imbue his story with the solemn, awe-inspired air of a pilgrimage. The critics praised this sensitive and richly detailed history, particularly de Waal's powerful account of the Nazis' atrocities. While the San Francisco Chronicle, the sole voice of dissent, found de Waal's story boring, the Christian Science Monitor declared that "there isn't a dull moment" in it. The Hare with Amber Eyes—part biography, part travelogue, and altogether a rip-roaring good story—should appeal to readers as well.
Bookmarks Magazine
(Starred review.) Not only did ceramicist de Waal inherit an unusual collection—264 netsuke, miniature figures exquisitely carved in Japan—he was also given the key to the remarkable history of his father’s Russian-rooted, cosmopolitan Jewish family, the Ephrussi, who made a fortune exporting grain. Charles, a cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather, acquired the netsuke just before the Japonisme craze crested in late-nineteenth-century Paris. A well-known collector and critic, an early champion of the impressionists, and the primary model for Proust’s Charles Swann, he gave his netsuke and vitrine, a customized glass display case, as a wedding gift to his Vienna-based first cousin, Viktor, and Emmy, his much younger, avidly fashionable wife. Their daughter, Elisabeth—a poet who exchanged letters with Rilke, a trail-blazing lawyer, and de Waal’s grandmother—rescued her family from the Nazis. Elisabeth’s brother Iggie, an intelligence officer, brought the collection back to Japan. As today’s keeper of the storied netsuke, famed artist and curator de Waal tells a spellbinding and perceptive tale of extraordinary accomplishment and loss, beauty and terror, reinvention and survival in an intricately dimensional, profoundly involving first book, a sensitive and astute inquiry into culture and family, inheritance and preservation, and the secret life of objects. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
A nimble history of one of the richest European families at the turn of the century. De Waal, a notable London potter, is a descendent of the wealthy Ephrussi family. He seized on an inherited collection of Japanese netsuke—small decorative figures made out of wood or ivory—and traced its ownership down the family line, from patriarch Charles Ephrussi, originally from Odessa, to Great-Uncle Iggie, of Tokyo, who left the 264 elegant figures to the author upon his death in 1993. The family's fabulous wealth derived from the grain-trading business, operating between Paris and Vienna. Charles, who assembled the collection, was a dandyish art collector who settled in Paris at the age of 21, wrote art criticism and a book on Durer and patronized the early Impressionists. He was quite possibly the real-life character on whom Proust modeled his Charles Swann. Subsequently, the netsuke was given to Charles's cousin Viktor on the occasion of his wedding in 1899—just at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, when French anti-Semitism burst forth in full force—and the collection passed to Vienna, where the family resided at the surpassingly beautiful Ephrussi Palais on the Ringstrasse. Anti-Jewish feeling pervaded all facets of their lives, and two world wars wreaked havoc on the Ephrussi fortune. Eventually the netsuke was saved from the rapacious hands of the Nazis by a servant who stuffed it in her mattress. De Waal keeps a pleasantly ironic tone throughout this remarkable journey and nicely handles the clutter of objects and relatives. The roster of characters is daunting at first, but this narrative proves a marvelously absorbing synthesis of art history, detective story and memoir.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Charles, like the rest of Paris, became swept up in the fad of "japonisme", which led to the original purchase of the netsuke. What did these objects represent to their collectors in the Belle Epoque?
2. In addition to his passion for Durer and the Old Masters and Japanese art, Charles radically embraced the Impressionists. What did he love about that new style? Which of these art spheres seems most quintessentially "Charles"?
3. Did you develop any new impressions of the major French art figures—Degas, Renoir, Proust—in light of their interaction with Charles?
4. How did the relationship between collector, patron, and artist evolve from Charles's Paris to Viktor's Vienna to Iggie's Tokyo? Where does Edmund fall in these roles?
5. The word "insatiability" was used by anti-Semites as a way to propagandize against Jewish families' material success. Why does this word become such a slur? How might the term apply more positively to collectors of things—and stories?
6. Why did Charles give away his beloved netsuke to Viktor and Emmy?
7. Edmund remarks on the coldness and lack of texture in the Palais at Vienna. What do the differences between Charles's salon in Paris and Viktor's grand Palais say about the two men?
8. Do you agree with Edmund's assessment that the netsuke need not go back to Japan; that their travels and stories have given them an identity of their own?
9. Are stories more important than objects in a family legacy? How are they related?
10. The Ephrussi patriarch Charles Joachim had a vision for his family, but it was dependent upon the future generations' aptitude and willingness. How do the Ephrussi childrens' responses to their "calling" vary? How does Edmund's book fit into the Ephrussi legacy?
11. You've likely read many accounts of Nazi raid and Jewish persecution at the start of the occupation, but did anything surprise you or stand out in this account of the takeover of the Palais?
12. Viktor and Emmy received vague warnings about the coming threats and were encouraged to flee their home. Would you have been able to walk away from such history and treasures without knowing what was ahead?
13. Viktor essentially sacrificed the Ephrussi dynasty for the sake of his new home country, Austria. Do you think anti-Semetic pressure drove him to become a perfectly loyal citizen, or did Viktor's allegiance represent his true feeling?
14. Edmund originally thought that all the Ephrussi "vagabonding" stemmed from a desire to develop culturally and grow from the provincialism of Odessa. But he realized that Odessa itself was a very culturally rich city. Why do you think it was so important for the Ephrussis to send tendrils of their families to different cities?
15. Why do you think Iggie renounced his American citizenship, a purely symbolic act?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World
Lisa Bloom, 2011
Vanguard Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781593157098
Summary
In Think, Lisa Bloom examines the stark paradoxes that American girls and women live today, including excelling in education but obsessing over celebrities and tabloid media, in outperforming male counterparts in employment yet spending more time and money on appearances.
Bloom wonders: How did we get from the Equal Pay Act and Title IX to celebutainment and Botox, and what can we do about it? Bloom proffers the solution: one simple word, Think.
In this provocative, entertaining, and thoroughly researched book, Bloom illuminates specific steps for women to take to reclaim their brains, regain their focus, and take charge of their lives. Think is delivered in a no-nonsense, straight-talk manner that will make you laugh, question yourself, and start thinking again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—Setember 26, 1961
• Where—California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Los Angeles;
J.D., Yale University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Lisa Bloom is a prominent American civil rights attorney, best known as anchor of Lisa Bloom: Open Court - a two-hour live legal news program—on truTv's In Session, formerly Court TV, from 2001 to 2009. She is the only child of famed attorney Gloria Allred.
Bloom received a bachelor's degree from UCLA and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School. Early on in her career, she earned a reputation as a champion of victims' rights. Among Bloom's many high-profile lawsuits, she unsuccessfully sued the Boy Scouts of America for sex discrimination on behalf of Katrina Yeaw, a girl who wanted to join the organization. She also filed a child sexual abuse case suit against the Catholic Church, and sued the Los Angeles Police Department on several occasions.
Bloom is a television legal analyst on CBS News, CNN and HLN, who also makes frequent appearances on The Early Show, The Insider, Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, The Situation Room, Reliable Sources, The Joy Behar Show and Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell.
Bloom is licensed to practice law in both New York and California.
Book
Bloom's book Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World, published in 2011, encourages women of all ages to eschew celebrity culture with its focus on the superficial, and instead to spend time reading and thinking. Think has been critically acclaimed and spent weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. A promotional article for the book, "How to Talk to Little Girls," was published on The Huffington Post. Over 800 comments were posted in response. The article ranked #12 on Facebook's Most Shared Articles on Facebook in 2011 ranking. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Think is a real eye-opener. Lisa Bloom brings her extraordinary passion, humor, and intelligence to the important subject of how women and girls can fight being drowned in a sea of pop culture, and lead lives that are fuller, richer, and more connected. Think educates, informs, and—thanks to Lisa’s wit and sense of humor—keeps us smiling along the way. Think is a must-read for all mothers and daughters.
Dr. Phil
Bloom’s manifesto mixes advice with insights backed up by examples, studies, anecdotes, and polls about our current kingdom of dumbdom, where “young women would rather be hot than smart.... The book offers step-by-step solutions in the chapter “Reclaiming the Brains God Gave Ya.” The most daunting challenge for many women, Bloom claims, is simply clawing back the time to think. How? Downsize your relationship to housework, for example, and don’t worry about your child’s every emotional upheaval. For single women, she’s equally blunt: Stop obsessing over your love life. Be busy. Be happy.
Elle
Think reads like a conversation with that best friend we all need. Funny, wise, opinionated, Lisa Bloom covers everything from Angelina Jolie to precut veggies in this how-to, what-for, this-matters guide to a meaningful and honorable life.
Jeffrey Toobin - CNN legal analyst; New Yorker writer
TV host, commentator and lawyer Bloom felt compelled to write her debut after becoming disgruntled with society's intellectual decline. Appalled by the fact that 23 percent of American women would rather lose their ability to read than their figures, the author writes with frantic urgency about the ignorance that is infecting the country and how this epidemic affects American women. A journalist whose career highlights include covering the Saddam Hussein trail, Bloom is dismayed that women are most interested in celebrity scandals, which make up more than 95 percent of the cases she is currently assigned to cover. The author urges women to reassess their priorities, put down the tabloid magazines and become more aware of world issues, many of which she indulges in detailing. Acknowledging that she would be taking cheap shots if she didn't offer solutions, the second half of the book suggests ways women can make a positive impact in their communities—e.g., volunteering and donating to worthy causes. The author also includes a list recommended reading and recipes that save time in the kitchen. While clearly written out of genuine concern, readers who are sensitive to criticism of American culture may take offense to the use of terms such as "Dumb American Syndrome." A wake-up call for women who have succumbed to a culture of mediocrity.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Think:
1. What has happened to American culture, according to Lisa Bloom? What studies, examples, and anecdotes does she site to support her assessment? Do you agree with Bloom? if so, what evidence can you add to hers?
2. Why are smart women playing stupid? Have you known girls or women who have done so? Have you ever found yourself playing down your own intelligence or talent (come on: be honest)?
3. What happened to the women's movement, according to Bloom, which once fought for equal pay and Title Ix? What undermined the fervor for women's rights?
4. What do you know of Bloom's personal background that would spur her to speak out as she has? Who, or what, were her early influences? Is there any contradiction in the fact that many of Bloom's legal clients are celebrities, the very people she warns women against becoming obsessed with?
5. Bloom extends the repercussions America's dumbing down to the third world where women's problems are truly stark. Do you think her assessment is correct...or does she overstate her case when it comes to international consequences of American culture?
6. What solutions does Bloom offer to women and girls, married and single? Do they make sense? Can you offer any of your own advice? How would you counsel a young woman today?
7. Are women the only ones affected by the dumbing down of American culture?
8. What did you find that surprised you in Bloom's book? What about humor—anything funny in Think?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War
Hal Vaughan, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307592637
Summary
Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture.
She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters.
In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.
Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the head of “a little black swan.” And, added Colette, “the heart of a little black bull.”
At the start of World War II, Chanel closed down her couture house and went across the street to live at the Hotel Ritz. Picasso, her friend, called her “one of the most sensible women in Europe.” She remained at the Ritz for the duration of the war, and after, went on to Switzerland.
For more than half a century, Chanel’s life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and myth. Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of these years.
Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative—part suspense thriller, part wartime portrait—fully pieces together the hidden years of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of World War II.
Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanel’s long-whispered collaboration with Hitler’s high-ranking officials in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, “Spatz” (“sparrow” in English), described in most Chanel biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player, playboy, and harmless dupe—a loyal German soldier and diplomat serving his mother country and not a member of the Nazi party.
In Vaughan’s absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage is revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military intelligence agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand to Hitler.
The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court’s opening a case concerning Chanel’s espionage activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself—and rebuild what has become the iconic House of Chanel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Hal Vaughan has been a newsman, foreign correspondent, and documentary film producer working in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia since 1957. He served in the U.S. military in World War II and Korea and has held various posts as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.
Vaughan is the author of Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and His Family in Occupied Paris and FDR’s 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa. He lives in Paris. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Too many diplomatic documents are reproduced at too much length. Contradictions are not clearly sorted out. Vaughan seems to have felt as though his rich source materials could speak for themselves, but they don’t — and he doesn’t succeed in lending authority to the accounts of contemporary witnesses who were, undoubtedly, unreliable.
Judith Warner - New York Times Book Review
[A] compelling chronicle of Coco Chanel...a different Chanel from any you'll find at the company store...by no means the account of an emerging style but a tale of how a single-minded woman faced history, made hard choices, connived, lied, collaborated and used every imaginable wile to survive and see that the people she cared about survived with her.... Vaughan has gleaned many of the details of Chanel's collaboration from documents that were scattered for years throughout European archives.... It's an astonishing story...gripping...provocative...riveting history.
Marie Arana - Washington Post
Chanel's war years, as explored by Hal Vaughan, are as camera-ready and as neck-deep in melodrama as Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, and just as hard to forget now that they're exposed.
David Darcy - San Francisco Chronicle
[Hal Vaughan] ably demonstrates that Chanel was far from an innocent victim of circumstance during the second world war but a fully fledged Abwehr (German secret service) agent with her own number and codename: Westminster (no doubt a nod to her one-time lover, the Duke of Westminster).... Vaughan, who writes with welcome economy and flair, deserves a lot of credit for finally unraveling the strands of Chanel’s deeply deceptive personality.
Tobias Grey - Financial Times
Sleeping with the Enemy sheds new light on Chanel's dealings with the famously tight-lipped Wertheimer family.... To this day, the family refuses to discuss Coco Chanel with the media, but Vaughan still manages to paint an engrossing portrait of the dealings between the two.
New Yorker.com
[Sleeping with the Enemy] distinguishes itself from the many other Chanel biographies by tackling the dicey subject of Gabrielle Chanel’s activities during World War II.... This is a frank and unsentimental portrait of a figure that fashion writers are nearly incapable of criticizing.... While Vaughan’s discussions of Chanel’s contributions to fashion add nothing new to the extensive literature on her, he more than makes up for it with his impressive research and the never-before-seen information that he has unearthed about her wartime activities... What Sleeping with the Enemy offers is a more rounded look at a figure who has been over-studied and under-examined.
Isabel Schwab - New Republic
Hal Vaughan has done a stupendous job of research.... Vaughan draws a brilliant portrait...a terrific and fascinating story...wonderfully told, and full of great characters.... Vaughan brings her to life so vividly that we understand why no less a judge than Andre Malraux said that "from this century in France only three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel."... It is that rarest of good reads, a biography about a famous person with a surprise on every page. Nancy Mitford, I think, would have loved it, and written a wonderful letter to Evelyn Waugh about it!
Mchael Korda - Daily Beast
Tenacious digging into secret wartime records reveals a worsening case for the legendary French designer. Well rendered by Vaughan...a sorry story of war-time collaboration, exacerbated by the lack of reckoning during her lifetime.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Sleeping with the Enemy:
1. What do you make of Coco Chanel? What kind of portrait does Hal Vaughan paint of her? How does this book's view of Chanel differ from the generally accepted one ? What did you know of Chanel before reading Sleeping with the Enemy...and how, if at all, were your views altered after finishing it?
2. What other individuals stand out, as either unlikeable or admirable, in Vaughan's account?
3. Talk about Paris as Vaughan describes it during the 1920s and 30s? What kind of place was it?
4. How well did the Parisian upper classes fare during the war, as compared with Parisians at large? Were you surprised at the disparity?
5. Talk about Chanel's activities during the war. What surprised—or shocked—you most?
6. The author quotes Chanel as saying, “from my earliest childhood I’ve been certain that they have taken everything away from me, that I’m dead.” What is the author's tone as he writes about Chanel? Does Vaughan seem, in some way, to exculpate Chanel—suggesting that she acted out of concern for her nephew or because of her sense of childhood abandonment? Do these reasons justify her actions? Do you wish Vaughan were more judgmental toward Chanel...or do you appreciate his detached, more objective stance?
7. What do you make of Chanel's anti-semitism? Were her views extreme for the time? Or did they reflect the prevailing atitudes of many, if not most, Europeans? (Does that make any difference?)
8. Does Vaughan make a convincing case that Chanel was a Nazi spy? For whom did she spy...on whom was she spying...and what specific information did she turn over?
9. Some critics have claimed that Vaughan offers an over-abundance of documents and leaves too many contradictions unresolved for readers to be able to sort things out clearly? Do you agree or disagree?
10. After the war, why was Chanel never punished for her activities? Who protected her...and why? Should she have been brought to account?
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo, 2012
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812979329
Summary
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”
But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1964
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for Public Service; MacArthur Fellowship;
The Hillman Prize; National Magazine Award for Feature Writing
• Currently—divides her time between the U.S. and India
Katherine (Kate) J. Boo is an award-winning journalist and author known primarily for writing about America's poor and disadvantaged.
A native of Washington, D.C., Boo attended the College of William and Mary and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and began her career in journalism with editorial positions at Washington's City Paper and then the Washington Monthly. From there she went to the Washington Post, from 1993 to 2003.
In 2000, her series for the Post about group homes for the mentally impaired won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer judges noted that her work "disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group homes for the mentally retarded, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms."
In 2003, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she had been contributing since 2001. One of her subsequent New Yorker articles, "The Marriage Cure," won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2004. The article chronicled state-sponsored efforts to teach poor people in an Oklahoma community about marriage in hopes that the classes would help people avoid or escape poverty. Another of Boo's New Yorker articles, "After Welfare," won the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award, which honors articles that advance the cause of social justice.
She was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, from 2002 through 2006. In 2002, she won a MacArthur Fellowship.[7]
In 2012, Boo published her first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity , a non-fiction account of life in the Annawadi slums of Mumbai, India. (Author bio from Wikipedia .)
Book Reviews
[An] exquisitely accomplished first book. Novelists dream of defining characters this swiftly and beautifully, but Ms. Boo is not a novelist. She is one of those rare, deep-digging journalists who can make truth surpass fiction, a documentarian with a superb sense of human drama. She makes it very easy to forget that this book is the work of a reporter.... Comparison to Dickens is not unwarranted.”
Janet Maslin - New York Times
A jaw-dropping achievement, an instant classic of narrative nonfiction.... With a cinematic intensity...Boo transcends and subverts every cliché, cynical or earnest, that we harbor about Indian destitution and gazes directly into the hearts, hopes, and human promise of vibrant people whom you’ll not soon forget.
Elle
Riveting, fearlessly reported.... [Beautiful Forevers] plays out like a swift, richly plotted novel. That's partly because Boo writes so damn well. But it's also because over the course of three years in India she got extraordinary access to the lives and minds of the Annawadi slum, a settlement nestled jarringly close to a shiny international airport and a row of luxury hotels. Grade: A.
Entertainment Weekly
A tough-minded, inspiring, and irresistible book.... Boo's extraordinary achievement is twofold. She shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as importantly, she makes us care. (Four stars.)
People
A shocking—and riveting—portrait of life in modern India.... This is one stunning piece of narrative nonfiction.... Boo’s prose is electric.
O, The Oprah Magazine
You'll know Boo from her work at the Washington Post and now as staff writer for The New Yorker, which has brought her any number of honors, including the MacArthur "genius" award. Her writing is marked by a persuasive sense of humanity, never more than in this study of the hopeful and go-getting inhabitants of the slums surrounding the luxury hotels at the Mumbai airport. Teenaged Abdul aims to better his family with finds from the trash rich tourists have discarded, for instance, while Asha works to make her promising daughter the slum's first female college graduate. Of course, abuse, envy, and political and religious tensions turn up as well. Comparisons to Slumdog Millionaire are inevitable, but this would also match up nicely with fiction from Aravind Adiga (e.g., The White Tiger). For all informed readers
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Barbara Ehrenreich calls Behind the Beautiful Forevers “one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve ever read.” Yet the book shows the world of the Indian rich—lavish Bollywood parties, an increasingly glamorous new airport—almost exclusively through the eyes of the Annawadians. Are they resentful? Are they envious? How does the wealth that surrounds the slumdwellers shape their own expectations and hopes?
2. As Abdul works day and night with garbage, keeping his head down, trying to support his large family, some other citydwellers think of him as garbage, too. How does Abdul react to how other people view him? How would you react? How do Abdul and his sort-of friend, Sunil, try to protect themselves and sustain self-esteem in the face of other people’s contempt?
3. The lives of ordinary women—their working lives, domestic lives, and inner lives—are an important part of Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The author has noted elsewhere that she’d felt a shortage of such accounts in nonfiction about urban India. Do women like Zehrunisa and Asha have more freedom in an urban slum than they would have had in the villages where they were born? What is Meena, a Dalit, spared by living in the city? What freedoms do Meena, Asha, and Zehrunisa still lack, in your view?
4. Asha grew up in rural poverty, and the teenaged marriage arranged by her family was to a man who drank more than he worked. In Annawadi, she takes a series of calculated risks to give her daughter Manju a life far more hopeful than that of other young women such as Meena. What does Asha lose by her efforts to improve her daughter’s life chances? What does she gain? Were Asha’s choices understandable to you, in the end?
5. The author has said elsewhere that while the book brings to light serious injustices, she believes there is also hope on almost every single page: in the imaginations, intelligence and courage of the people she writes about. What are the qualities of a child like Sunil that might flourish in a society that did a better job of recognizing his capacities?
6. When we think of corruption, the examples tend to be drawn from big business or top levels of government. The kind of corruption Behind the Beautiful Forevers show us is often described as “petty”. Do you agree with that characterization of the corruption Annawadians encounter in their daily lives? Why might such corrruption be on the increase as India grows wealthier as a nation?
7. Does Asha have a point when she argues that something isn’t wrong if the powerful people say that it’s right? How does constant exposure to corruption change a person’s internal understanding of right and wrong?
8. Shortly before Abdul is sent to juvenile jail, a major newspaper runs a story about the facility headlined: “Dongri Home is a Living Hell.” Abdul’s experience of Dongri is more complex, though. How does being wrenched away from his work responsibilities at Annawadi change his understandings of the hardships of other people? Are terms like liberty and freedom understood differently by people who live in different conditions?
9. Fatima’s neighbors view her whorling rages, like her bright lipsticks, as free comic entertainments. How has her personality been shaped by the fact that she has been defined since birth by her disability—very literally named by it? Zehrunusa waivers between sympathy for and disapproval of her difficult neighbor. In the end, did you?
10. Zehrunisa remembers a time when every slumdweller was roughly equal in his or her misery, and competition between neighbors didn’t get so out of hand. Abdul doesn’t know whether or not to believe her account of a gentler past. Do you believe it? Might increased hopes for a better life have a dark as well as a bright side?
11. Many Annawadians—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian—spend less time in religious observance than they did when they were younger, and a pink temple on the edge of the sewage lake goes largely unused. In a time of relative hope and constant improvisation for the slumdwellers, why might religious practice be diminishing? What role does religious faith still play in the slumdwellers’ lives?
12. Who do you think had the best life in the book, and why?
13. In the Author’s Note Katherine Boo emphasizes the volatility of an age in which capital moves quickly around the planet, government supports decline, and temporary work proliferates. Had the author followed the families of Annawadi for only a few weeks or months, would you have come away with a different understanding of the effects of that volatility? Does uncertainty about their homes and incomes change how Annawadians view their neighbors? Does economic uncertainty affect relationships where you live?
14. At one point in the book, Abdul takes to heart the moral of a Hindu myth related by The Master: Allow your flesh to be eaten by the eagles of the world. Suffer nobly, and you’ll be rewarded in the end. What is the connection between suffering and redemption in this book? What connections between suffering and redemption do you see in your own life? Are the sufferers ennobled? Are the good rewarded in the end?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
Harriet Reisen, 2009
Picador:Macmillan
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312658878
Summary
A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has delighted millions of readers
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott’s life: the effect of her father’s self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family’s chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott’s journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author’s classic rags-to-riches tale.
Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Harriet Reisen’s diverse credits include: in media; scripting dramatic and historical documentaries for PBS and HBO, co-producing National Public Radio (NPR) series Blacklisted [for Tony Kahn], and contributing radio commentary to Morning Edition, Marketplace, and Morning Stories. Music: two regional Emmy nominations for Best Song (with Jeanie Stahl) and Best Composer. Lyrics: songs on Rounder Records (Mason Daring, producer), and award-winning video, “Jersey Shore” (with Jeanie Stahl and Tony Kahn). Teaching: film history and criticism at Stanford University, and screenwriting at Harvard Summer School. Journalism: articles about Mexican language schools, Mexican Art, Mexican margaritas, and international adoption in Travel and Leisure, Provincetown Arts, Tin House, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
At last, Louisa May Alcott has the biography that admirers of Little Women might have hoped for.
Wall Street Journal's Best 10 Books of the Year
Fans will adore Harriet Reisen's sympathetic biography.... With charming verve, she details Alcott's remarkable if difficult life.
USA Today
Superb.... Punctuates the myths of the Alcott family, rendering Louisa May with nuance.
Chicago Tribune
If Beth, Meg, Amy, and Jo are forever fixed in your memory, you’ll be fascinated by this well-researched and well-written biography of the author of Little Women. But Reisen is only an adequate reader of her own work. She has a lovely low-pitched voice, but a narrow vocal range and little ability to provide dramatic energy or diversity to her narrative and characters. This diminishes the listener’s emotional connection to members of the Alcott family and the famous transcendentalists and feminists who peopled Louisa’s very turbulent life.
Publishers Weekly
Public television writer and producer Reisen's biography is the result of a deeply held, lifelong affection for Louisa May Alcott; it's a substantial by-product of the research undertaken to write and produce a documentary film biography of the same title to air December 2009 as part of the PBS "American Masters" series. Reisen's writing is lively and appealing. She analyzes Alcott's best-known works—Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys—as well as Pauline's Passion and Punishment, Behind a Mask, and Perilous Play, the pulp fiction Alcott wrote anonymously or as A.M. Barnard. Drawing extensively from Alcott's journals and letters as well as those of her family members, Reisen portrays Alcott's life with precision and sympathy yet does not hide her flaws. This compelling biography allows readers to know Alcott and appreciate her as "her own best character." VerdictL Highly recommended for Alcott fans as well as readers interested in American women writers and women's studies. —Kathryn R. Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN
Library Journal
A deliciously palatable biography of the iconic writer whose life was "as full of plot and character as any [she] invented."Inspired by research from her documentary of Alcott (1832-1888) for the PBS series American Masters, Reisen delivers an in-depth portrait of the spirited, sentimental, imaginative, realistic woman whose childhood vow was to "be rich, famous, and happy." Reisen draws extensively from Alcott's prodigious output of literary works, travel sketches, articles, journals and letters, as well as the recollections of her contemporaries. Born to bohemian intellectuals, the young Alcott grew into a moody, passionate girl much like her famous character, Jo March. Her parents kept the company of transcendental luminaries like Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Hawthorne, but experienced material poverty. The utopian nightmare of her father's experiment in communal living, her youngest sister's death and her older sister's engagement became defining events in Alcott's life, leaving her determined to shoulder family financial and household burdens. Under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, Alcott churned out pulp-fiction thrillers, generating income and sating her thirst for adventure. She followed the phenomenal success of Little Women in 1868 with six other popular children's novels, but was tormented by a culture of celebrity and ill health until her death. Reisen deftly weaves the story of Alcott's life into the rich social, cultural and historical fabric of mid-19th-century New England. The author's insightful examination reveals Alcott as a compulsive writer who peppered her stories with external details and internal currents of her life; an ardent abolitionist who served as a Civil War army nurse; a self-espoused spinster who cherished her independence but harbored a schoolgirl romantic attachment to Thoreau and a midlife crush on a young Polish pianist; a thoroughly modern feminist who wrote about the power struggle between the sexes and championed women's suffrage; and a middle-aged woman who relied on opiates to cope with her failing health. An absorbing portrait of the protean author whose "life was no children's book."
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your first experience with Little Women? How old were you? Who introduced you to the story? Which of the sisters did you relate to the most? What scenes do you remember most vividly today?
2. Louisa May Alcott describes the realization of her artistic ambitions as “a long-held dream.” Reisen borrows the phrase to describe her own passion for literary biography. Do you believe that Louisa completely fulfilled her long-held dream, or is her work unfinished? Does Reisen fulfill her dream? Can a biography of someone as complex and influential as Louisa ever be finished?
3. In what ways is Louisa a quintessential American figure?
4. In what ways was Louisa far ahead of her time?
5. What traits did Louisa adopt or inherit from her mother? How do those traits contribute to her survival and success? See her mother's letter to her on page 118. How does her advice become central to Louisa's lifelong “creed” on page 332:“Work is such a beautiful & helpful thing & independence so delightful”?
6. Reisen portrays the relationship between Louisa and Bronson as the most complicated of her life, beginning with their shared birthdays and ending with their near-simultaneous deaths. See Bronson’s birthday letters to the child Louisa (52, 79)— how does Reisen characterize Bronson? Does Louisa’s desire to remain unattached stem from her view of her parents’ marriage? Do Reisen’s speculations about Bronson’s likely mental illness affect your impression of him? Do your feelings about him change throughout the book?
7. Under the pen name and alter ego A. M. Barnard, Louisa wrote work that is a far cry from the sweet, domestic stories for which she was popularly known. Is it possible to write well about subjects or places one has never experienced, as when Louisa writes about prostitutes, murder, and sexual relationships? Did she in fact have dark knowledge to draw upon as inspiration?
8. Thoreau and Emerson were ever-present forces in Louisa’s life. How might she have fared without their help and influence? What are some of the roles they played for her and Bronson?
9. In what ways do the Marches live a rosier life than the Alcotts? Did Louisa create the Little Women version of her family in order to explore and work out negative feelings about her childhood? Do you think the book would have been as commercially successful if it were more closely autobiographical?
10. Louisa worked on Moods at different times throughout her career, but seems never to have been happy with it (234). Why did she return to it again at the age of 50 rather than starting a new project? Why did she feel the need to write a great “adult” novel, after achieving such honor and success with Little Women?
11. Louisa’s poems reveal much about her various emotional and mental states throughout her life. Yet, her response to the publication of the heartfelt “Thoreau’s Flute” (226) was that she was a “mercenary creature” who enjoyed the 10 dollars it brought. Does Louisa seem to take refuge in art perhaps as the only place where she can reveal her vulnerabilities?
12. Would Louisa have been happier had she chosen to be more “selfish” after her success, choosing relaxation and pleasure like May? Why does Louisa believe that May’s near-perfect happiness after her marriage was too good to last? Was May’s untimely death a symbolic blow for Louisa as well in terms of her view of life?
13. Louisa moved countless times in her life, hardly staying in the same place for longer than a year. Why was it so difficult for her to settle in any location? What were the effects of her vagabond lifestyle?
14. Money was Louisa’s greatest motivation for her relentless pace of writing, but fame was an inevitable consequence. Was she ever able to truly enjoy the fruits of her labors? Why did she either dismiss or hide from her fans—with the exception of the Lukens sisters (322)? Why did she wish all her letters to be burned after her death? And why do you think she was so especially careful not to disclose the nature of her relationship with Laddie?
15. Louisa seems to take solace in work and a sense of sacrifice for her family. Was she justified in thinking of herself as a martyr for her family, beginning with Reisen’s oft-mentioned incident with the plumcakes? Does Louisa take up this role independently, or is it forced upon her? Why does it especially bother her not to receive presents for Christmas or birthdays? Consider the tragedy that she died utterly alone on her sickbed.
16. How does this biography affect your previous impressions of Louisa? Of mid-19th century America? Of your own attitudes toward familial responsibility and independence?
(Questions issued by publisher.)