Fire from Heaven

Synopsis
The formative years of Alexander the Great, the first of a trilogy.

My thoughts
Much of the book centers around Alexander's complicated family life and his warring parents, Olympias and Philip. They married for political reasons, and Philip is suspicious of Olympias's use of magic. Because of Olympias's sorcery, Alexander isn't entirely certain of his paternity. Is he mortal Philip's offspring or the result of a union between Olympias and a god? Alexander is closest to Olympias, but he is Philip's heir. As he grows up he learns the arts of war and he and his father reach an uneasy truce. But Olympias and Philip continue to spar with each other, and Alexander is often caught in the middle. Alexander is also embarrassed by his father's extramarital affairs, and Philip's threats to disinherit Alexander backfire - instead of obeying him, Alexander becomes rebellious. The drama builds until Alexander is forced to choose between them, and Mary Renault does a good job building layers of suspense until the final act.

Thank goodness for this book's matter-of-fact attitude toward Alexander's relationship with Hephaistion. Renault writes in an author's note that homosexual relationships among men weren't unusual in the ancient world, and Renault depicts Alexander and Hephaistion as true soul mates. They share an immediate connection with each other and their friendship grows as they grow up. Hephaistion acts as a steadying influence on Alexander. Alexander confides in Hephaistion, and Hephaistion develops a second sense of what Alexander needs and when he'll need it. In some ways he understands Alexander better than Alexander understands himself.

The book's one weakness is that Alexander is a little too perfect. He never makes mistakes and he is more godlike than human.

Bottom line
Well-researched historical fiction with beautiful, vivid writing.

Fine print
Fire from Heaven, by Mary Renault
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Middlesex

Synopsis
A multi-generational saga reveals how the narrator ended up with a chromosomal abnormality that allowed him to be mistaken for a girl until he was a teenager.

My thoughts
I was skeptical of this book when my book club selected it almost 10 years ago. The cover looked overly serious and the premise sounded overly ambitious. And everyone in my book club had a strong opinion on Middlesex. You either loved it or you hated it. I was in the "loved it" camp. It's in my all-time favorites list, and I decided to read it again to see if it was really as good as I remembered it. It was better.

The story is told by 41-year-old Cal Stephanides, an American expat living in Germany. Cal flashes back to a small village in war-torn Greece, where his grandparents' elaborate courtship begins. From there, the story moves to the booming metropolis of Detroit, where Cal's parents grow up. Cal, born Calliope, grows up in a city that's consumed by racial strife, and her family joins others in the white flight to the suburbs. The story takes delicious twists and turns until it finally reaches the pivotal moment - when Callie discovers she's not a girl. And then it deals with the aftermath. (This is the only complaint I have about the book. When Callie/Cal moves away from her family and the characters I'd come to know and love, the story suffers. There are colorful new characters, but they don't have the same depth. And running away was necessary for Cal to come into his own, but I just wasn't as excited about this part of the book.)

The beauty is in the storytelling. Jeffrey Eugenides's writing is infused with love and enthusiasm for his Greek heritage and the city of Detroit. Brilliantly, he uses a production of the play "The Minotaur" as a metaphor for Callie's chromosomal abnormality. Callie's grandparents (all four of them) attend the play about the half-man, half-beast monstrosity the night her parents (both of them) are conceived, thus passing along the genes that will lead to Callie's deformity.

The city of Detroit is just as much a character in the story as Callie or any of her family members. Eugenides describes streets and buildings the way they were in the city's heyday, the way you'd get all misty-eyed about a lost loved one.

The book is nearly perfect - fascinating plot, complex characters, dry humor, and perfect pacing.

Bottom line
Read it - it's a book that will appeal to a diverse array of people from geneticists to linguists.

Fine print
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey

Synopsis
A biography of the privileged but unfortunate French queen.

My thoughts
Marie Antoinette, the queen of France during one of the most tumultuous times in European history, is a rich subject for a biography. Antonia Fraser does a good job combing through the mountains of correspondence to, from, and about Marie Antoinette to sketch a sympathetic portrait of her.

Marie Antoinette was a contemporary of Catherine the Great, and it was interesting to read a biography of one and then the other. I found a few similarities between the two famous monarchs - both were forced to leave their families for marriages with men who were physically and emotionally immature. Both were originally from countries that were hostile to the ones they married into. Both were expected to bear heirs and not much else (yet they ultimately eclipsed their husbands - albeit for very different reasons). Both were stifled by a court life that was overly regimented and restrictive. And ... that's pretty much it. Catherine the Great became an effective ruler while Marie Antoinette was swept away with the rest of the monarchy in the French Revolution (which, in turn, horrified Catherine and confirmed her belief that enlightened despotism was not a practical way to rule an empire). Marie Antoinette was the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa, yet her education was severely lacking. Catherine the Great impressed adults with her precocious intelligence when she was a young girl, and as a woman she made a point to educate herself by reading the works of the Enlightenment. Catherine learned to manipulate and work with the politicians and courtiers around her; Marie Antoinette never did. Marie Antoinette was more successful than Catherine in only one area - marital relations. Her relationship with Louis XVI was initially awkward, but they matured into a caring team.

Fraser is a talented historian, but she does a bit too much apologizing for Marie Antoinette. The fact that she was borderline illiterate wasn't her fault, according to Fraser; the blame lies with her negligent tutors and a mother who was far too busy running an empire to properly educate one of her backup daughters. (Marie Antoinette was the fifteenth of sixteen children and was sent to France only after smallpox killed one of her sisters and scarred another so badly that she was considered unfit for marriage.) She may have been flighty, but you can't blame her for that either - that was simply the culture of the French court. She was undoubtedly extravagant, but that was the nature of European royalty.

Even so, the deck was stacked against her. The political climate in France made revolution almost inevitable, although Louis XVI's shaky leadership certainly exacerbated the situation, and the fact that Marie Antoinette was Austrian by birth marked her as a potential enemy no matter who her husband was. The fall of the monarchy, Marie Antoinette's long months in captivity, and her ill-fated attempt to flee to Austria are all compelling reading.

Bottom line
A complete picture of one of the most unfairly maligned historical figures in Western civilization.

Fine print
Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser
Genre: biogrphy
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Alice, Let's Eat

Synopsis
Calvin Trillin writes of his two great loves - his wife and his appetite.

My thoughts
Trillin wrote one of my favorite pieces in The Best American Travel Writing 2009 - a delightful piece on finding the best Texas BBQ restaurant that I loved despite the fact that I know about as much about barbeque as I know about quantum physics.

Alice, Let's Eat is simultaneously a series of humorous vignettes about food and a love letter to his long-suffering wife. Trillin conveys their playful affection for each other - she always trying to restrain him from overeating, he insisting that she's the abnormal one for trying to limit him to three square meals a day. It's bittersweet knowing that Alice passed away in 2001.

There's never a dull moment with the Trillins. To compensate for going solo to a private dinner for "grown-up food writers" concocted by a French chef whose cooking Alice desperately wants to try, Trillin gets tickets for a church fair where the food may or may not include polecat.

This is food writing at its best. You need your sense of taste to enjoy food, and it's nearly impossible to render a meal into an interesting story. Trillin succeeds because he focuses on the pursuit of the meal and the characters he meets along the way. Every single story has laugh-out-loud moments. "I spent an embarrassing number of years in the belief that marshmallows grew on bushes," Trillin confesses at one point in one of my favorite lines. Some of the funniest passages concern Trillin's strong opinions on matters ranging from his love for his home city of Kansas City to his outright hostility to any food that might be healthy.

By the end of the book I felt like I knew the Trillins. I'm not a foodie, but I'd love to have eaten a meal with them. Definitely a meal cooked by someone else, though. I tried to make one of my husband's favorite dishes this week. He commented, "Well ... it would probably taste like croque monsieur to someone who'd never had it before." And then he made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Bottom line
Hilarious, as Trillin always is.

Fine print
Alice, Let's Eat, by Calvin Trillin
Genre: food, humor
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library. It was one of those lovely old hardcovers from that era when a hardcover cost half as much as a paperback does today and there was a slip on the inside back cover with due date stamps from the '70s and '80s.

The Kingmaker's Daughter

Synopsis
The Cousins' War through the eyes of Anne Neville, daughter of Lord Warwick and wife of Edward of Westminster and Richard III.

My thoughts
This is technically the fourth book in Philippa Gregory's series of the Cousins' War, but The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker's Daughter all take place more or less concurrently. The Kingmaker's Daughter rebounds from the somewhat disappointing White Queen, but it's still not as strong as The Lady of the Rivers, chronologically the first book in the series.

This series views the Cousins' War through the eyes of the women who schemed and prayed for York and Lancaster. Gregory depicts Anne Neville as an insecure child pawn who grows into an intelligent, decisive woman. But no matter how strong or independent Gregory tries to make her, Anne Neville remains a woman in a time when women were considered the property of their fathers and then their husbands. As a result, there's a lot of Anne eavesdropping on pivotal conversations, hearing about battles second hand, and wringing her hands when she finds herself in a situation she doesn't have the power to change. There's nothing Gregory can do to make Anne Neville one of the principal players in the Cousins' War when she was mostly an observer. The decisions weren't hers to make, so Anne spends her life dealing with the aftershocks of her father's and husbands' decisions. But there's still plenty of drama and Gregory works skillfully with what she has.

The  novel follows Anne from early childhood, when she's a gawky girl in her older sister Isabel's shadow. Isabel is married off to George Duke of Clarence and their father Lord Warwick plots to put George on the throne. The family dynamics are one of the strengths of this book. Warrick's wife and daughters have no choice but to obediently follow his orders, and the relationship between the sisters is nicely drawn. There's a natural sibling rivalry between them, but they also depend on each other for support in the face of their father's ruthless ambition. Warwick's attempt to replace Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville with George and Isabel fails tragically and spectacularly, and it's one of the most harrowing parts of the entire series. Warwick forces his family to flee, and Isabel, pregnant with her first child, goes into labor in a storm at sea. Gregory suggests that if Isabel had been on dry land with midwives to assist her, everything would have been fine. But Isabel nearly dies and her child is stillborn. It's difficult to read and it's a damning indictment of the male-dominated world of medieval England. Warwick's ambition matters more to him than his own daughter.

Licking his wounds after his ignominious flight from England, Warwick devises a new plan to seize the throne. He marries Anne to the son of his lifelong enemy, Margaret of Anjou, who Anne has been brought up to fear as "the bad queen," and throws his support behind the Lancastrians. This also fails tragically and spectacularly, and Anne loses both her father and her husband in separate battles that she (and the reader) hear about piecemeal from various sources. (Minor quibble: at several points later in the book Anne looks back on Edward of Westminster and her short marriage to him with an affection that I found totally baffling considering that she didn't really know him and didn't like what she did know of him.)

Anne finds herself utterly bereft - her father and husband are dead, her mother has abandoned her to seek sanctuary in a nunnery, her domineering mother-in-law is imprisoned, and her sister has turned on her as a traitor to the Yorks. It's at this point that Gregory decides to give Anne a spine and she runs off with Richard Duke of Gloucester. Their marriage is depicted as a love match, and it's nice to see Anne finally happy (even if the cynical part of me wondered whether Richard was in love with Anne or the wealth and power their marriage brought him).

This series is well done. I'm in awe of the painstaking research Gregory did to sketch a detailed portrait of the women of this era. The women in this series are barely mentioned in the larger historical record, but they come to life in these novels. They matter. Most of the historical record was written by men and not much was recorded about the women of medieval Europe because they weren't the primary decision-makers. Gregory infuses the historical record with a refreshing dash of girl power. It's fun to read even if it isn't the way it actually happened. In some ways the scanty documentation of women gives Gregory more freedom - she's able to invent personalities and events to suit her version of history. And the women in all of her books - not just this series - are definitely more creatures of the 21st century than their own era. They're more independent and less deferential.

Bottom line
Gregory has me hooked on this series. They're like Pringles - once you pop, you can't stop. I love women in history, and this period of English history is rich with drama.

Fine print
The Kingmaker's Daughter, by Philippa Gregory
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Catherine the Great

Synopsis
The story of a German girl named Sophia who had no Russian roots but married the grandson of Peter the Great and overthrew her incompetent husband to seize the throne and become Catherine the Great.

My thoughts
Catherine the Great was a truly remarkable woman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert K. Massie knows how to tell a story. (Especially this story. Russian history is confusing, and Massie does a good job making things interesting while explaining the convoluted rules of Romanov succession and keeping the endless foreign ambassadors straight.)

Catherine made her own destiny. She was married at the age of sixteen to the emotionally stunted Romanov heir, Peter, who either could not or would not consummate the marriage. Both Peter and Catherine eventually had extramarital affairs and Massie hints strongly that Catherine's son Paul may have been Sergei Saltykov's child rather than Peter's. Paul was taken from Catherine and raised under the direction of Peter's aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Catherine was ignored while she recovered and she passed the time by reading the works of the Enlightenment, which influenced the early years of her reign. She began to cultivate friendships with political factions that were opposed to Peter's pro-Prussian leanings (Russia and Prussia were bitter enemies, but Peter's early upbringing had been German). These became significant when Elizabeth died and Peter assumed the throne and immediately halted the Seven Years' War with Prussia on terms that were immensely favorable to Prussia. By this point, Peter was openly hostile to Catherine and was making noise about setting her aside in favor of his mistress. Catherine's supporters rallied behind her and she seized the throne.

As empress, Catherine strove to be an enlightened despot. Early in her reign, she explored the feasibility of emancipating Russia's serfs but found no support among the nobility (the serfs were not freed until the reign of her great-grandson Alexander in 1861). As her reign progressed, she was forced to put down rebellions and she was shaken and horrified by the French Revolution. She came to realize that governing Russia required a heavier hand than Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the other scholars of the Enlightenment advocated.

Catherine was a power on the international scene. She installed one of her former lovers as the titular monarch of Poland and then initiated the partitioning of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. She also targeted the weakening Ottoman Empire and extended Russia's territory to give it ports in the Black Sea. Catherine ruled alongside (and sometimes fought against) some of the "greats" of European royalty - Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria for starters. (And speaking of them, I'd like to request biographies on these two because I don't know nearly enough about them.)

Catherine blazed her own path when it came to her love life as well. Empress Elizabeth's "favorite" had been accepted in her court and Massie points out that this was de rigueur in other European nations as well. But two factors made Catherine's love life remarkable. First, Catherine had a rather large number of acknowledged lovers. Second, the mature Catherine was something of a cougar. Massie prints excerpts from some of the correspondence between Catherine and her favorites to show Catherine's passionate personality. Some of the most tempestuous letters are between Catherine and Gregory Potemkin, who Massie speculates may have actually married Catherine. His tenure as a favorite was relatively short, but after it was over Potemkin remained one of Catherine's closest and most trusted advisers right up until his death.

Bottom line
A meticulously researched and expertly paced biography of one of the most fascinating European monarchs.

Fine print
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.