Louise reviews Ella:Princess, Saint and Martyr

Ella: Princess, Saint and Martyr by Christopher Warwick (2006) is the remarkable tale of Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna. Ella, as she was called, was the daughter of Princess Alice of Great Britain and granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Born into royalty and considered the most beautiful princess in Europe at the time, Ella's life is one marked by privilege, war, death, religious conversion, terrorism and sainthood. Warwick has authored previous best-selling biographies of British nobility and has an exquisite skill for breathing life into 19th century European history.
Under Warwick's pen, the life of the princess who would become a beloved saint of the Russian Orthodox Church is meticulously presented in a manner free from the gossip, innuendo and rumor. Although some reviewers do take exception to Warwick's treatment of historical fact as it relates to the Prussian Wars, his handling of the personal lives of these historical figures is sublime.
Ella married Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, fifth son of the then Russian Emperor Alexander II. It was Ella's younger sister Alexandra who was to later marry Tsar Nicholas II, thus becoming Russia's ill-fated Empress Alexandra. Tragically, it was the fate that Ella herself would share. In 1905, as revolution loomed in Russia, Serge was assassinated by the Bolsheviks; literally blown apart by a bomb thrown into his carriage.
Ella refused to leave Russia amid protests from friends and family. Intense religious conviction and an entrenched compassion to help the poor and suffering, which Ella had acquired from her mother Princess Alice, kept her from fleeing to safety after the revolution. In 1909 she established the first religious community of its kind in Russia, the Order of the Saints Martha and Mary. Her devotion was to the poor, sick and forgotten of Moscow. While considered a living saint to those she helped, she could not escape history and in 1918 she and the last surviving Romanov princes and sisters from her convent were executed in the pine forests of Sinyachikha two days after the execution of the Tsar, Tsarina and all members of the Russian Imperial family.
The reader cannot help but be mesmerized by the follies of Imperial narcissism in the face of Russia's famines reflected in this book. The rigid Victorian social tenets endured by so many and the complex arrangements of royal intermarriages. The book pulls the reader through some of the most momentous periods in history. The perspective is not merely regal as the reader also comes to understand the many class conflicts of the time. Warwick is attentive to courtly details and ceremonies, but refrains from being too tedious. It is the poignant and yet, melancholy gaze of Ella from the cover photograph that fixes the reader. We are drawn closer to her, and to her magnificently tragic life.

2007 Notable Nonfiction

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
From Publishers Weekly: "This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor."

Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.
From Publishers Weekly: "Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity."

Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth.
From Publishers Weekly: "Much of the book's success is rooted in Flannery's succinct and fascinating insights into related topics, such as the differences between the terms greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change, and how the El Niño cycle of extreme climatic events "had a profound re-organising effect on nature." But the heart of the book is Flannery's impassioned look at the earth's "colossal" carbon dioxide pollution problem and his argument for how we can shift from our current global reliance on fossil fuels [...]. Flannery consistently produces the hard goods related to his main message that our environmental behavior makes us all "weather makers" who "already possess all the tools required to avoid catastrophic climate change." "

Greene, Melissa Fay. There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey To Rescue Africa’s Children.
From Publishers Weekly: "Not unlike the AIDS pandemic itself, the odyssey of Haregewoin Teferra, who took in AIDS orphans, began in small stages and grew to irrevocably transform her life from that of "a nice neighborhood lady" to a figure of fame, infamy and ultimate restoration. In telling her story, journalist Greene who had adopted two Ethiopian children before meeting Teferra, juggles political history, medical reportage and personal memoir."

Hessler, Peter. Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present.
From Publishers Weekly: "Hessler, who first wrote about China in his 2001 bestseller, River Town, a portrait of his Peace Corps years in Fuling, continues his conflicted affair with that complex country in a second book that reflects the maturity of time and experience. Having lived in China for a decade now, fluent in Mandarin and working as a correspondent in Beijing, Hessler displays impressive knowledge, research and personal encounters as he brings the country's peoples, foibles and history into sharp focus."

Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.
From The Washington Post's Book World: "It is hard to imagine that, less than a year after the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history, there would be much appetite for reliving the horrors of Hurricane Katrina -- manmade or otherwise. And it is equally difficult to imagine encountering anything fresh on a subject that's been so thoroughly dissected. Yet in this solid if somewhat detached recounting, New Orleans journalist Jed Horne has provided new insights into how a ferocious storm, governmental ineptitude and racially tinged inequities conspired to permanently jeopardize one of the nation's cultural gems."

King, Ross. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World of Impressionism.
From The Washington Post's Book World: "In The Judgment of Paris, Ross King describes "Olympia" as "easily the most notorious painting of the nineteenth century," placing it at the center of his fluent account of the years that ushered in the age of Impressionism. With the solid craftsmanship that characterized his previous two popular histories, Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, King's new book impressively synthesizes research on the culture, politics and personalities of an era that was anything but uncomplicated."

Kohlberg, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.
From Scientific American: "In the 1990s the inhabitants of Shishmaref, an Inupiat village on the Alaskan island of Sarichef, noticed that sea ice was forming later and melting earlier. The change meant that they could not safely hunt seal as they had traditionally and that a protective skirt of ice no longer buffered the small town from destructive storm waves. Shishmaref was being undone by a warming world. To survive, the villagers recently decided to move to the mainland. Soon Shishmaref on Sarichef will be gone. Pithy and powerful, the opening of Elizabeth Kolbert's book about global warming, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, echoes that of another book that also originated as a series of articles in the New Yorker magazine. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring starts in much the same way, with a fable about a town that lived in harmony with its surroundings and that fell silent. "

Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage Community, and War.
From Publishers Weekly: "In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) examines the history of Plymouth Colony. In the early 17th century, a small group of devout English Christians fled their villages to escape persecution, going first to Holland, then making the now infamous 10-week voyage to the New World. Rather than arriving in the summer months as planned, they landed in November, low on supplies. Luckily, they were met by the Wampanoag Indians and their wizened chief, Massasoit. In economical, well-paced prose, Philbrick masterfully recounts the desperate circumstances of both the settlers and their would-be hosts, and how the Wampanoags saved the colony from certain destruction."

Phillips, Julie. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
From The Washington Post's Book World: "If you lived in McLean, Va., in the 1960s and '70s, you probably ran into Alice B. Sheldon. You might have seen her shopping for dresses at Lord & Taylor's or buying gardening supplies at Hechinger's. But you would not have known that under the pseudonym "James Tiptree Jr.," she wrote works that were at the vortex of gender wars that raged in the world of science fiction.
Sheldon (1915-87) was the most important sf writer ever to live in the Washington area. She also was, in her varied career, a psychologist, a CIA officer and a chicken farmer. Her biographer, Julie Phillips, combines diligent archival work with more than 40 interviews to successfully portray one of sf's most brilliant -- and tortured -- authors."

Zoellner, Tom, The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.
From Publishers Weekly: After his fiancée dumps him and he's left with a diamond ring to unload, Men's Health contributing editor Zoellner crisscrosses the globe unlocking the mystique of this glittering stone "that brings misery to millions of people across the world." Zoellner probes how "blood diamonds" are used to fund vicious civil wars in Africa; how De Beers, seeing new markets to exploit, linked diamonds to the ancient yuino ceremony in Japan and played on caste obsession in India; and how India is pushing Belgium and Israel out of the gem trade.

Carol Warfel reviews Thirteen Moons

Charles Frazier’s second novel, Thirteen Moons, returns to the 19th century North Carolina of his best selling first novel, Cold Mountain. However, rather than the Civil War, this novel focuses on the Cherokee Indians with emphasis on the famous Trail of Tears removal of the Cherokee Nation to the West in 1838.

Written as a memoir, the novel covers the life of Will Cooper, an orphan who was adopted by a Cherokee Chief and became a trader, a lawyer, a real estate tycoon, a senator, a colonel, a de facto Cherokee Chief, and acquainted with Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, Davie Crockett and other notables. (Frazier certainly owes a debt to Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man in his main character's exploits and his broad plot outline and structure.)

Even though Cooper’s adoptive father, Bear, and his clan are not members of the Cherokee Nation, but live in the rugged mountains of North Carolina, land considered useless by many, the U.S. government wants them removed to the territories along with the Cherokee Nation. Cooper negotiates with the government to exempt Bear’s people from the removal.

The novel is somewhat episodic and covers about 80 years, but it is held together by the themes of the Indians’ struggle to maintain their lands, the changes wrought by white settlement, and the beauty of the unspoiled landscape. Another thread that holds the novel together is Cooper’s love for Claire, a love which is experiences loss time after time.

Frazier makes a disclaimer in his "Author's Note" that "Will Cooper is not William Holland Thomas, though they do share some DNA." However, in Cherokee Nation: a History, author Robert Conley describes William Thomas as "a white man who had been raised by the Cherokees, spoke the language, and was generally well thought of among the Cherokees." He continues to describe an account of Thomas helping U.S. soldiers to track down and execute a family of Cherokee who had killed several soldiers. Frazier uses this event in his novel and the description of Thomas fits Cooper exactly.

Frazier successfully puts a human face on the conflict and injustice experienced by the Cherokee during this time. Frazier's evocative descriptions of the North Carolina mountains and the life of the Indians living there are beautiful and worth the time to read the novel.

Carol H. Warfel