★ Memories:
From Moscow to the Black Sea
Teffi, trans. from the Russian by Robert
Chandler et al. New York Review Books, $16.95
trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-59017-951-2
The first-ever English translation of
Russian writer Teffi’s memoir follows the
top-notch satirist as she embarks on a
literary tour of Ukraine in 1918, simultaneously fleeing the Bolsheviks and journeying “south, always further south, and
always without any deliberate choice”
until reaching Yekaterinodar, where her
account ends. Teffi’s memoir is a departure
from typical self-absorbed, navel-gazing
fare: she was best known in early-20th-
century Russia as a feuilletonist, a writer
of breezy and witty cultural essays, and
her recollections center on the colorful,
comical, desperate, and persistent characters she meets along the way. Here, she
alternates quick, playful dialogue and
sly observations of human behavior with
gruesome images—a Bolshevik boiled
alive, a dog dragging a chewed-off
human arm, bloated cow corpses bobbing
in the ocean—and occasional moments
of stunning lyricism, a testament to her
background as a songwriter as well as the
skill of the translators. “There is nowhere
a human being cannot live,” Teffi writes,
and this is perhaps the overarching theme
of her work; throughout the memoir,
oppressed and terrified Russians binge on
apples and delight in new dresses made
from medical gauze (“It’s good hygiene
too—thoroughly sterilized,” a friend boasts
to her excitedly), refusing to cede their
everyday pleasures to political terror.
This collection of vignettes about life as
a refugee is by turns hilarious, beautiful,
and heartbreaking, and strikingly holds
up despite being a century old. (May)
African American Writing:
A Literary Approach
Werner Sollors. Temple Univ., $35 (296p)
ISBN 978-1-4399-1337-6
Sollors (Neither Black nor White yet Both),
a professor of African-American studies
and English at Harvard, assembles 12
previously published essays that collectively
offer an illuminating and fresh introduc-
tion to African-American writers. Together,
they constitute a cohesive vision of major
writers from the 18th through the 20th
century. Sollors’s aim is not a general his-
the chairman’s death in 1976, and the
condemnation of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing
and her henchmen, the Gang of Four.
Dikötter shows how Mao’s legacy of famine,
disease, and a shattered educational
system unintentionally allowed an underground society to thrive “as a realm of
freedom.” Dikötter reveals that the
Cultural Revolution failed to eradicate
counterrevolutionary elements; instead,
it erased Maoism and established a black
market that continues to have global
repercussions. (May)
★ Blood, Bone, and Marrow:
A Biography of Harry Crews
Ted Geltner. Univ. of Georgia, $32.95 (406p)
ISBN 978-0-8203-4923-7
Geltner brilliantly renders the life of
the late writer Harry Crews (1935–2012)
in this well-researched and
vivid biography.
It captures the
wild spirit of an
unflinching
American writer
from his early
years in impoverished Bacon
County, Ga.
(which Crews
devastatingly captured in his most beloved
book, A Childhood), to his years as an
esteemed but volatile faculty member in
the University of Florida’s creative writing
program. In just two decades, from the
1960s to the 1980s, Crews went from
working as a junior college composition
teacher to being a friend of Madonna and
featured writer for Playboy. Geltner traces
much of the inner pain in Crews’s life back
to his tense relationship with his brother,
Hoyett; the suspicion that his father was
not his biological parent; and the shocking
death by drowning of his young son.
Geltner deftly examines each of Crews’s
books and, without glossing over his
alcoholism, shows that the hard living for
which Crews was known did not break his
ability to write. His discipline and respect
for the art were reflected in the motto
displayed above his desk: “Get Your Ass on
the Chair.” Geltner proves that Crews was
not just a great “Southern Gothic” writer,
but a great American one, too. (May)
social history—“the limits of power
and the boundaries of dissent”—in this
persuasive study of the relationship of
military courts-martial to broader social
questions. For Bray, the court-martial
reveals “the ways that ordinary people
managed big social and political pressures
in the face of sweeping changes.” In the
early national period, military law was
mostly a “set of fair guesses and reasonable
assumptions.” With the Civil War and
imperial expansion came issues of trying
civilians under military law, finding “any
level of legal process at all for black soldiers,” and addressing torture and reprisal
killings as routine aspects of American
counterinsurgency in the Philippines. The
20th century brought drastic changes:
“American military justice produced giant
show trials, a mass execution carried out
in secret, towering acts of racial injustice,
routine cruelty, and a set of procedural rules
that finally made courts-martial so much
more fair for defendants.” Bray convincingly argues that as the military justice
system continues confronting fundamental
questions about American society, “a steady
march toward the civilianization of
military courts has given soldiers due-process protections that are, in their historical
context, stunning.” (May)
The Cultural Revolution:
A People’s History, 1962–1976
Frank Dikötter. Bloomsbury $30 (432p)
ISBN 978-1-63286-421-5
In this richly documented final volume
of a trilogy on the Maoist era, Dikötter,
Samuel Johnson Prize winner for Mao’s
Great Famine and professor of humanities at
the University of Hong Kong, powerfully
captures Mao Zedong’s China during the
Chairman’s last decade. Digging deeply into
newly released material, Dikötter paints a
chilling picture of an old man with “an
enormous appetite for sex” who was busy
“settling personal scores.” The account opens
in the wake of the Great Chinese Famine,
which marked the nadir of Mao’s popularity.
As Dikötter moves into the latter half of
the 1960s, he divides it into the blood-soaked “red years,” when the Red Guard
(an exclusive youth cadre) had free rein to
slaughter those they labeled bourgeois, and
the “black years,” when the purge turned
inward on the party. The “grey years” of
the 1970s were marked by Nixon’s visit,
