“A poignant and humane memoir.” from paper love
United States with key events illustrated by (or occasioned by) a postage stamp from the era. We learn about the gradual improvements brought about by developments in printing, the preponderance of white men pictured (George Washington has appeared on more than 130), the stamps produced by the Confederacy during the Civil War, the arrival of parcel post, the emergence of air mail (Charles Lindbergh was a postal pilot until immortality beckoned), the story of Georg Olden (the first African-American to design a postage stamp) and all sorts of other philatelic goodies. Unsurprisingly, much of the focus—early in the history—is on military events and the doings of U.S. presidents. Gradually, however, West broadens his scope, just as the Postal Service did in its commemoratives. Readers will be able to detect his determination to appear disinterested in American politics, evident in his praise and criticism of lightning-rod figures like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The author has a soft spot for Andrew Carnegie, calling him “a man of principle,” a characterization that will set spinning in their graves a legion of his competitors. West does not say a lot about the literary figures on stamps—though he does mention The Grapes of Wrath, Sidney Lanier and a few others. He seems (correctly?) to suspect that readers would rather hear about Davy Crockett, Billy the Kid, Louis Armstrong, the Enola Gay and the evolution of the computer. Lightweight but informative, like a classy commemorative. (36 full-color images)
PAPER LOVE Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
Wildman, Sarah Riverhead (400 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 30, 2014 978-1-59463-155-9
A journalist’s account of how her attempts to learn about her grandfather’s lost “true love” turned into a quest to understand the place of the Holocaust in her life and the lives of other young Jews. Former New Republic staffer Wildman grew up surrounded by stories about her grandfather Karl’s charmed existence. He had been one of the lucky Jews able to escape Vienna with both his life and professional credentials intact not long after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. But when the author found photos of an unknown woman in a family album, her grandmother revealed that Karl had once been profoundly in love with a girl named Valy, whom he’d reluctantly had to leave behind. Many years later, after stumbling across letters that her grandmother had somehow overlooked in her destructive mission to preserve the myth of Karl’s “spotless escape,” Wildman began to put together the story behind Karl and Valy’s relationship. Hungry for details, she traveled to Vienna and, later, Germany and the Czech Republic, where she researched Valy’s life and visited the places that bore her imprint. The author concluded that both Karl and his lover had borne burdens of sorrow, guilt and loneliness far greater than anyone had known. At the same time, she also uncovered a 76
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15 september 2014
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nonfiction
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worldwide network of people outside her family whose lives had been touched by not only Valy and Karl, but by Nazi terrorism. Wildman realized that history had been served to her, and the members of her generation, in ways that were far too “sanitized” and “clean.” This profound book derives its power not so much from the love story at its heart, but from the historical urgency with which Wildman infuses it. The author makes clear that only by engaging with inherited past trauma deeply and fully can individuals and communities begin the long and difficult process of looking for ways to regain wholeness. A poignant and humane memoir.
AMBITION AND DESIRE The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte Williams, Kate Ballantine (400 pp.) $30.00 | Nov. 4, 2014 978-0-345-52283-2
A British historian’s capable account of Josephine Bonaparte (1763-1814) and her tumultuous relationship with the celebrated French general and political
leader Napoleon. Born in Martinique to a family of planters, Marie-JosepheRose de Tascher de la Pagerie, whom Napoleon would later rename Josephine, dreamed of escaping to the colorful world her father, a former page at the court of Versailles, had told her awaited in Paris. The opportunity to leave for France came in the form of marriage to a wealthy but dissipated young seducer, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who ridiculed his new wife mercilessly for her “thick Creole accent and clumsy manner.” Only after de Beauharnais divorced her four years later did Josephine begin her transformation into one of the most desirable women of her age. Determined to find a place among the glittering French nobility, she became a courtesan; through a combination of political savvy and luck, she managed to survive the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath. Liaisons with important leaders eventually brought Josephine into contact with the hero of the French counterrevolution, Napoleon, who fell passionately in love with her. Against the wishes of the socially ambitious Bonaparte family, the pair married in 1796. For the next eight years, the balance of power between them favored Josephine, who took lovers while her husband gloried in his military conquests. But as the ungainly Napoleon grew more desirous to become the new European Caesar, that balance shifted decidedly in his favor. Josephine—who was unable to bear her husband a child—eventually found herself displaced by hordes of mistresses and eventually, a second empress, Marie-Louise of Austria. Yet, as Williams (Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain’s Greatest Monarch, 2010, etc.) ably shows, beneath the lust for power and prominence each shared, a remarkably durable passion bound them together to the end. An intelligent and entertaining biography of “the Empress whom France never forgot.”
kirkus.com
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