Accidental Blogger

A partial list of biographies I have read in recent months.  I won’t attempt in-depth reviews except to say that I enjoyed all of them, some more than others.

Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel :  The title of the book notwithstanding, this book is not about Galileo’s daughter but an excellent profile of her illustrious and famous father.  Maria Celeste, oldest of Galileo’s illegitimate children, was a cloistered nun from her early teens and maintained a loving relationship with her father throughout her brief life.  Maria, whose own life was devoted to following God’s laws in order that she would ensure a safe passage to the metaphysical heaven of her faith for herself and her flock, adopted her spiritual name as a tribute to her father’s life time of work charting the scientific laws governing the physical heavens. An account of mutual love, dependence and occasional role reversal, the father-daughter tale is masterfully handled by author Dava Sobel.

While Maria devoted her life to serving the Catholic church, Galileo spent much of his fighting it. But never was that an issue of contention between the two.  Sobel’s research on Galileo’s life and work casts a wide net to capture the zeitgeist of 17th century Europe – of the burgeoning clash between science and faith. But the personal side of Galileo’s life, his quotidian concerns about health, money, employment and personal relations are revealed largely through the numerous letters that he wrote to his daughter.  The correspondence was clearly a two way traffic but we get to see only one side of it.  The letters that Maria wrote to her father were not found among the copious quantities of scholarly paper work that Galileo left behind.  But his own letters to Maria were all lovingly preserved by her and were discovered among the meager belongings of the young woman when she died at the age of thirty three. From Galileo’s letters we often get a sense of what Maria may have written to him. It is very touching to discover that while Galileo often poured out his frustrations and despair over worldly matters in his letters, Maria Celeste, the devoted servant of the Catholic church, encouraged her father to summon his courage in validating his scientific claims that ran so afoul of the very ecclesiastical institution she herself had vowed to unquestioningly serve and obey.

Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein:  Before I read Rebecca Goldstein’s book, I had only a vague notion of Spinoza’s philosophy and almost none about his personal life story.  Goldstein sets about to put flesh on the meager bones of the "personal" side of Spinoza’s life.  Her approach is to not just examine Benedictus Spinoza (his adopted name) the 17th century European philosopher, but also Baruch Spinoza, the European Jew whose life story was molded to a large extent by the history of the Catholic inquisition of Iberian Jews.  According to the author, that Spinoza, the most famous Jewish heretic, lived his life from age twenty three onwards as neither Christian, Jew nor Muslim, was a remarkable fact in itself.  But she also argues that his concept of the universality of life and the universe would not have been possible had it not been for his special experience and education as a Portuguese Marrano Jew in the progressive Christian nation of the Netherlands.  Goldstein, a professor of philosophy, weaves a very interesting (and convincing) tale of the Marrano Jews, their persecution, death, forced conversion, escape, reconversion to the faith of their ancestors and their influence on Spinoza’s subsequent views. But Goldstein keeps going back to this history once too often to make the connections, making her arguments a bit repetitive.  She also provides a lucid explanation of Spinoza’s world view in a slightly pedagogic fashion in the manner of Philosophy 101 which is very useful for readers like me who lack a background in the formal study of the subject.  On the whole, a good read. 

Two Lives by Vikram Seth:  I thoroughly enjoyed this book by Vikram Seth whose other enormously popular opus A Suitable Boy, I wasn’t able to plod through. This one too is a weighty tome – 500 pages of densely written chronicle but Seth makes almost every observation relevant and interesting.  Two Lives is actually Three Lives.  Apart from being the biography of Seth’s Indian born uncle Shanti and his German Jewish wife Henny, it is also partly Seth’s own memoir.

I will not go into too many particulars of the lives whose stories and histories are interwoven seamlessly in this book and which unfold in three different countries – India, Germany and England. The lives of the uncle and aunt are recreated from a series of interviews that Seth conducted with Uncle Shanti after Henny’s death and from a secret treasure trove of letters and photographs belonging to Henny which Seth found in the attic of the London home that Shanti and Henny lived in during their marriage.  Shanti and Henny’s lives came together long before they became man and wife.  Uncle Shanti had arrived in Berlin, Germany in 1931 from India to study dentistry. He became a boarder in the home of a Jewish family, the Caros, which at that time consisted of Gabriele Caro a widow, and her three children Lola, Henny and Heinz.  The three Caro children were  close to Shanti’s age and he became their friend, especially of the two Caro sisters. Shanti’s life in Germany was an enjoyable sojourn comprising a successful education and a busy social life in the company of Lola, Henny and their German friends.  Shanti and Henny’s early friendship in Germany had no hint of a romance or physical love.  Only after 1939 on the eve of WWII, when both find themselves as uprooted individuals in England (for very different reasons) and rekindle their earlier friendship that we begin to see a more intimate relationship emerge.  Seth’s account of the relatively peaceful and prosperous marital life of his aunt and uncle and the rarely spoken but tragic end that befell Henny’s German Jewish family is very well written. Two Lives is a tale of love, war, marriage, companionship, friendship and trust.  The reader will be often surprised by the unlikely places where one finds one and doesn’t find the other.   

No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin:  The lengthy biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt is a good book but not a scintillating one.  I patiently labored through the 636 pages (700+ including the footnotes) and finally ended up enjoying it quite a bit. It was very illuminating to obtain an historical perspective of depression era America and its mindset preceding and during WWII.  Also, my book club picked the book which provided the main impetus for reading it.

The biography of Franklin (FDR) and Eleanor Roosevelt (ER)is perhaps more interesting than the lives of most presidential couples, not just because the two were amazingly accomplished individuals who left an indelible mark on this nation and the world but also because they lived during a momentous period in 20th century history that straddled two great wars and the American depression and subsequent economic boom brought about by a cranked up war machinery and an interventionist government which believed that the fate of its citizens could not be left to the whims of mere market forces, however free. From the GI bill which educated and rehabilitated thousands of returning war veterans to Social Security, the far reaching changes introduced by the FDR administration during its unprecendent four terms have their reverberations in American life even today. There is not much point in going into the details of the well known and celebrated life stories of FDR and ER, two of the best known public figures in US history.  Both were remarkable people but their characters were as different as chalk and cheese. The flamboyant, charming and ever diplomatic FDR governed by consensus but made sure that he was surrounded by aides and advisors as intelligent and visionary as himself – those who could ably defend and justify his own views before the American public and the world. (what a contrast to the Bush administration’s confederacy of dunces.) As his hardworking and equally visionary wife, ER ran almost a parallel presidency where she was her own news gatherer and observer of the human condition.  By the time FDR’s lengthy presidential tenure began, the romantic and conjugal relations between FDR and ER were long over, due to her husband’s extramarital infidelity – a betrayal that crushed ER emotionally. (The couple had five children at the time.) But their respect and confidence in each other’s ability to serve the nation was unshakable.  Of the two impressive, larger than life figures, ER comes out as the bigger hero in my eyes.  According to all history books, she was the eyes and ears of her crippled and wheelchair bound husband to whom she reported back the truth about America, especially its minorities, women and labor forces. But it is abundantly clear that she was also his moral compass, helping him to steer American politics towards a more generous, inclusive and progressive direction. Of the two, she was the more courageous, speaking truth to power unlike her more charming and diplomatic husband. She agonized over and opposed FDR’s decision to intern Japanese Americans and considered it the biggest blot on America’s otherwise heroic role in WWII.  She had no hesitation in putting America’s staunchest ally and bombastic war hero Winston Churchill in his place by pointing out the inconsistency of his position of righteously fighting against Nazi imperialism while maintaining a racist and rapacious attitude towards British colonialism.  ER was a woman way ahead of her time.  Some of the policies she had in mind for women and minorities have not been wholly realized even sixty years after she first championed them. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin does a meticulous job of recording the joint life story of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt.  Perhaps too meticulous – no detail is too minor for her. At times, the book reads like a series of newspaper reports with the minutiae of daily events which so many decades later, do not serve to shed particularly interesting light on the history of that era.  But the title of the book is apt.  That was indeed No Ordinary Time and FDR and ER were no ordinary public figures.