Researched and written with vibrant detail, the book runs a thriller’s pace. Blurbs call out “Astonishing…” “Captivating…” “Addictively readable.” Exactly right; I couldn’t put it down.
This book is not a novel, not espionage fiction and not a memoir. This book is about the history of World War II. It’s about American Women’s History.
Secret teams of American women–thousands and thousands of women–were recruited before they graduated from universities and colleges or they were schoolteachers or intelligent young women in need of a job and eager to serve their country. More than 10,000 women were civilians working for the Army or enlisted in the Navy. All were trained in code-breaking, cryptology and sworn to secrecy. For years, they cracked multiple ever-changing German and Japanese communications code systems.
At the time, it was thought that women were more careful and had a better temperament for repetitive work than men. Yes, they could do the tedious repetitive analytic tasks and recognize patterns, compute numbers mentally and break cipher keys as well. Mundy writes: “To a real extent, the same prejudice against women persists to this day. Even now, the disciplines that are hardest for women to break into–like math and laboratory and computer science–are the ones that are believed to depend on innate genius, a trait long, and wrongly, associated chiefly with men. … But all along there have been female geniuses whose contributions are as important. It’s just that far less attention has been paid to them, and often these women were denied the top spots that would have brought them more recognition.”
Code breakers at Arlington Hall, U.S. Army communications station during WWII.
Thanks to round-the-clock shifts of enlisted and civilian women (and men who were not assigned to combat roles) deciphering coded messages in Washington, the Allies kept just in front of German and Japanese maritime movements and supply chains. The majority of the code-hackers and linguists were women, working at the U.S. Navy Communications Annex near American University in Washington and at Arlington Hall in Virginia for the U.S. Army. During 1943-44, hundreds of female recruits were assigned to the NCR factory in Dayton, Ohio to build and test the Bombe code-breaking machines designed by Alan Turing to counter the German Enigma enciphering machine.
Code breakers at Bletchley Park, England.
By the run-up to D-Day, the contents of intercepted cables were solved and relayed by the code-cracking women in Washington to their counterparts at Bletchley Park and vice versa. Decoded communications reached Allied brass around the world almost as fast as encrypted messages were transmitted by the enemies.
During 1942-45, my Mother was working on arial photography interpretation and my Father on topographic models for bombing logistics at RAF Medmenham. Like many of the women profiled in Code Girls, my parents met while on active duty.
Liza Mundy has researched and written an outstanding book about the long-hidden achievements by American women who worked to defeat authoritarian dictators and fascism that exalts nationalism and race.
By Elizabeth Becker . Simon and Schuster, Trade paperback edition 2016.
Elizabeth Becker spoke to an audience in the Ralph Bunche Library at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC about her latest book, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, as part of the Library’s ongoing Speaker Series.
In 1980 there were 250 million tourists. In 1995, 500 million. By 2012? Wait for it…. One billion tourists rove the planet in search of something different than home. Then there’s the environmental impact of the mammoth cruise ships, idling buses, trains, planes, ferries or cars they rode in on. Where ever that place may be, there’s an impact – sometimes positive, often negative.
A large eager group listened to Elizabeth Becker discuss the research and analysis behind her new work “Overbooked” The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism published by Simon & Schuster this year. Becker pointed out that tourism provides opportunities for advancing public diplomacy and ran us through the efforts of savvy countries like France, Costa Rica, China and others with national marketing programs. Attracting tourists from BRIC countries – China mainly- France harnessed the power of tourism decades ago. The “well-heeled, educated tourists” leave their RMB, reals, and rupees and rubles throughout France, not just Paris. The country has an integrated win-win marketing strategy that drills down to agricultural networks so provincial inns will have enough succulent organic lamb chops for the menus. Every week, a cultural festival in different regional towns ensures steady stream of visitors. The tourism ministry even issued a marketing report on how to attract Chinese tourists.
Alas, the US government abandoned the promotion of US tourism around 1995. There’s no national tourism marketing program. Since 2011, tourist traffic to the US has flat-lined, called “the lost decade” by travel industry professionals, said Becker. During the same decade, the number of tourists nearly doubled. In 2009, more Chinese went to Paris than anywhere in the entire USA, including Hawai’I, Becker pointed out. US efforts to leverage tourism for public diplomacy are lightweight or non-existent. Tourism marketing is left to the states, Becker pointed out, but most states don’t have the resources to integrate with regional or national travel networks.
Anyone who’s been out and about in the world during the 21st century knows about the crowds of people – in the baggage scan line, traveling and spending money. Too bad they aren’t spending that moola in the US, even if they do stand on the wrong side of Metro escalators. The impact of gigantic cruise ships damages the ocean ecosystem and shore environments. Fragile Venice receives 20 to 24 million tourists a year. Angkor Wat took in 800,000 tourists in the first quarter of 2013, yet the province of Siem Reap is now Cambodia’s poorest with devastating environmental degradation and declining water resources. I wonder if there is an internal migration issue as well, as in China, Mexico and elsewhere, farm families go to the tourist destinations for hotel construction work or service jobs, but can no longer afford to live in their own region. I’ll have to read the book to find out.
It’s not all bad though – Costa Rica practically invented eco-tourism and maintains highly sustainable programs. African game safari tourism is key to protecting animals and communities, Becker commented.
The Q & A session opened with discussion of what can be done to tap into tourism revenues and how can public diplomacy leverage tourism to support its goals. Becker mentioned that in the past Embassies offered information about travel in the US, helping to promote the US tourism industry. She mentioned that the US could encourage residents and citizens to learn foreign languages to be better hosts for those potential visitors. At the request of one participant, Becker recalled her celebrated war reporting career, a strange interview with Pol Pot followed by a desperate escape from Cambodia.
In The Art of Grace, Pulitzer Prize winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman explores the meaning of moving gracefully.While thought and reason are celebrated, it turns out our brains exist so that our bodies will move better.Those who cannot flee fast, fall to the predator.
Britain ruled India as the British Raj from 1858 to 1947. Before that, the East India Company — an English trading corporation — operated and functioned as de facto government in India – from 1757 to 1858. England wasn’t the only European country operating trading enterprises in India. The history of India’s quest for freedom arises from nearly 200 years of English governance of an ancient country and its peoples.
White Mughals delves into the lives of individual European commercial and military officers with vivid portraits of their careers, families and relationships with Indian people–lords and ladies, local servants and British staff. During such a long occupation, many English mated and married Hindi women. Their children became part of another layer of dynastic control or rebellion.
One such affair of the heart took place in early 1800s in Hyderabad between James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair-un-Nissa Begum. Kirkpatrick had previously served in Carolina and owned a plantation there, plus an estate Hollidale near Bromley in Kent. The descriptions of daily life in the couple’s household in India are sensuously memorable.
The history may leave a sour taste for Indians and English alike. An illustrative aspect of the era demonstrates cultural sharing and learning among the cultures. The exhibition at the Asia Society Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857 includes works by Mughal court painters and a few paintings produced for Delhi-based Raj figures such as William Fraser, James Skinner and Thomas Metcalfe.
A traveler may acquire insight into the emotions and endurance of people on all sides of this historical era.
White Mughals, Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
Here’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed — a terrific read, a thrilling trip, adventurous women — what more could one want! For this life-long voyager, it offered an historical version of my own round-the-world trips. You don’t have to be a traveler to get a kick out of reading about two enterprising women journalists and their historic global circumnavigation in opposite directions.
Eighty Days takes its title fromJules Verne‘s serialized novelAround the World in Eighty Days, published in book form in 1873.
Eighty Days opens in mid November, 1889 when 25-year-old journalist Nellie Bly is waving farewell to chilly, wet New York City from the deck of the steamship Augusta Victoria. The book tracks her biggest story — a solo global circuit and intrepid race against time — eastward across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and Asia. The author introduces us to Nellie Bly’s character and achievements as a pioneering investigative reporter adept at “stunt journalism“. She posed as a factory worker. She exposed baby-selling scams. She got herself locked up in an asylum for the insane for nearly two weeks by acting bizarrely so she would be incarcerated as mentally disturbed. Her reports sparked a grand jury investigation of public hospitals for women where conditions were unsanitary and cruel.
Nellie Bly dressed for travel, 1889.
Nellie Bly was not a novice traveler. She had lived in Mexico with her mother for company, writing articles about bullfights, coffin manufacturers, political graft and cultural oddities. Proof of her travel saavy was the single small handbag she carried as luggage, now displayed in the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth Bisland en route around the world, 1889.
Meanwhile, a competing publication sweet-talked another woman to race around the globe in the other direction, westward across the continent and the Pacific Ocean, committing her to return to New York City before Bly. Elizabeth Bisland, a gently-bred Louisianan, was an accomplished literary essayist and poet, 28 years old in 1889 when the around her world trip began a few hours after Nellie Bly sailed away.
During her years as a magazine essayist and community group leader in New Orleans she had forged a life-long friendship with the acclaimed author Lafcadio Hearn, but she hadn’t traveled beyond the southern and eastern states. In New York City, Bisland was a serious professional writer, stylish and well-dressed, the toast of the New York literary scene of the day. Photographs in the book show a pristine beauty. She traveled with several trunks filled with clothes and accessories for the climate changes anticipated during nearly three months at sea and on the road.
Author Matthew Goodman
Matthew Goodman does a brilliant job of explaining the travel infrastructure of the 1890s — grand hotels, steamships, comfortable railway carriages in the USA and the rudimentary, poorly heated rail cars in Europe and beyond. The British Empire made such a journey possible with its tightly scheduled steamships moving mail, people and supplies to the colonies with refueling stops strung around the world. At that time, the sun never set on the British empire.
As any true traveler knows, the people in a place show the real story. Goodman explores the city streets, ports, lodgings, restaurants and markets, writing historically accurate scenes of faraway places. Prejudice, injustice and the downtrodden lives of the world’s workers are exposed. Too many travel narratives shy away from tough realities, presenting a distorted rosy view of places tourists pass through insulated by money and tour guides. At sea, headed for China, Bisland writes about the human cargo of Chinese railroad workers forced out of the USA some of them ill and half-dead. Bly made a point of going ashore whenever possible to poke around street markets, ride in human-powered pedicabs or watch port operations and refueling.
Thanks to the British Empire, English was spoken just about everywhere the women put ashore as well as at the telegraph stations . Logistics were complicated to arrange without telephones, mobile phones or online travel sites. For me, an attractive feature of the book is following their route on the maps, noting transport connections and wondering if any of those elegant old hotels remain. I’ve had the pleasure of staying in one or two very vintage hotels in Asia, but renovations might be overly elaborate and erase historical character.
Still, their journeys were not luxury tours hopping from one British outpost to another. Annoyances ranged from extreme temperatures, weather delays, dramatic storms at sea, fickle health, loneliness, intruding gawkers and local reporters in search of a story. Nellie reinforced her pre-existing negative opinion of the snobby Brits and Elizabeth learned that she liked to travel, despite a tipsy stomach.
Elizabeth Bisland and Nellie Bly used telegraph messages to communicate their progress which the newspapers used to pump reader interest and increase circulation. One paper ran a contest with a free trip for the winner who could guess Bly’s completion date. It was a neck-to-neck race in opposite directions and I won’t spoil the suspense unfolding during their around-the-world journeys by spilling the beans about the final days and the unusual trajectory of their lives afterwards.
Eighty Days was released in paperback on March 11, 2014. It’s a great book for book club discussion groups too. Read my interview with Matthew Goodman at AdventureTravelWriter.org
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne book cover.
Ballantine Books
ISBN: 978-0-345-52727 eBook: 978-0-804-17644-6
Paperback edition, 2014. $16.00
Includes: Index, Bibliography, Photographs, Maps and a guide for reading groups
Around the World in 80 Days film publicity 1956.
Some readers may remember the 1956 Technicolor film with David Niven in the title role and a legacy of five Academy Awards. The film Around the World in Eighty Days wasproduced by Elizabeth Taylor’s beloved husband Mike Todd, who died in an aircraft accident 18 months later.
Who wouldn’t enjoy following the sun through Europe to end on Summer Solstice in Scotland? That’s the premise for the author’s bicycle journey from Cadiz, Spain to Callanish, Scotland. is to follow the sun, a passionate interest of The author is passionate about connecting with people and explores the differences among cultures as well as the universal binding qualities of humanity. The trip took place a while ago, during the early years of the Common Market. Considering one of the finest travel books ever — Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Between the Woods and the Water” — was written decades after the experience, I fully embraced the timelessness of this enjoyable narrative where spirit transcends distance.
The author is well integrated in local habits, traveling as a slow-moving cyclist on a Peugeot clunker. He mentions being thanked for American assistance to Europe during WWII — that’s because even now in the 21st century, European folks of a certain age often insert a thanks for Liberation Day in conversations with visiting Americans.
The reader wheels along with the author. And it’s a great ride. Mitchell artfully describes landscape, the curious characters and the local cuisine. He never misses a human interest story and samples the local plonk, usually with a talkative companion.
Interwoven with the journey narrative are tidy summaries of historical or scientific detours relevant to the place, climate or festivals encountered by the author. Religious cults, folktales, myth, pilgrimage routes and culinary lore expand the thread of Hansen’s journey. He arrives in Scotland for the summer solstice.
En route, we learn of the westerly winds that permitted Christopher Columbus to push further west off the “edge of the known earth” and eventually sight the islands we know as the West Indies. This provides a segue into the solar influenced civilizations of the new world. Ever mindful of the sun, Mitchell discusses bird and animal behavior related to the sun and solar eclipses. We hear about the religious and intellectual growth of Spain during the enlightened years of Muslim rule prior to. He touches on bullfights and the Mithraic cult of the bull and sun, early Christian rituals, Greek myth, harvesting grapes and how to cut peat. All of it is fascinating material, lucidly presented. Alas, the book lacks an index.
Several times Mitchell mentions sojourns in Spain and France prior to this bike pilgrimage, so we can assume he knows the languages, always useful for independent travelers. Either he diligently recorded his previous travels, or he plays with memory. It would be useful to know whether he kept a diary at the time to assist memory and report past conversations verbatim. Many travel writers do this. For example, “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water,” describe Patrick Leigh Fermor’s walk across Europe at age 18; he wrote these books as a mature adult and occasionally quotes the people he met years earlier, but makes it clear that he was using detailed diaries as a source.
Mitchell acknowledges contributions from friends he met up with during the journey. While I believe it is possible for a writer to have vibrant memories of significant journeys and other experiences in life, it seems only fair to let readers know about invented dialogue based on memory. Then we’re more likely to accept that every encounter really took place and wasn’t a mirage or convenient authorial invention.
Ariel Glucklich‘s stories lead one into the next, step by step. Like climbing a hill, the dance of life and human thoughts, there’s a path to the light through the dark, on and on around the great metaphorical wheel. In this particular story, P. L. Shivaram, retired librarian for the Karnataka Power Thermal Corporation Ltd., leads the reluctant pilgrim, a biologist recovering from a long illness, up Chamundi Hill. The librarian nudges, explains and entertains during the long climb. The American pilgrim listens and comes to terms with various types of pain in his life. The hill serves as symbol and fact: representative of life’s path and a real homage site that people climb barefoot to honor the deities. Each twist of the route upwards offers the storyteller another opening to tell a Hindu parable. The pilgrim spills his share of stories too, balancing the librarian’s narrative of mythology with obtainable lessons gleaned from the shocks of an examined life. This charmed book could be Aesop’s fables – Indian style — with a week of dandy bedtime stories for grownups.
HarperCollins, 2003, ISBN 0-06-050894-9, Cloth bound, 246 pages
A slightly different version of this review appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, Celebrating and Serving Literature since 1980.
Who was Louise Colet? Close friend, confident and lover of one of France’s greatest novelists — Gustave Flaubert. But long before she met Flaubert, she was a highly productive poet and essayist, a feminist dedicated to fighting for equal rights for women and honored by the Académie Française. She is usually described in the context of her friendship with Gustave Flaubert and billed as his muse. Yet, it is important to remember that when the writers met, she was the celebrated one, a 36 year old self-supporting poet noticed by the Académie, while he was an unpublished 24 year old aspiring novelist.
Louise Colet developed into a scathing political satirist, dedicated to supporting the mid – 19th century drive for liberty and justice. Decades after the American and French Revolutions which certainly jolted the aristocratic land-owning class, representative governance and human legal equality were still a distant dream for most people. The “trickle down” factors of economic equity, universal suffrage and political liberty were still being hammered out in North America and Europe. The idea that human rights and political equality and legal independence applied to women was hardly a view shared by men of the era. In this time period the people of many European countries pushed for democracy, labor and voting rights, legal equity and individual liberty. And so were Americans seeking civil justice, an end to slavery, voting rights for women and poor people who were excluded from participating in elections.
To follow the footsteps of Louise Colet, go to Provence, to Mouriès, the village near Servanes. The Hostellerie de Servanes is the ancestral estate where Louise Révoil grew up. Born in Aix-en-Provence, east of Servanes, Louise’s maternal family were local gentry with generations serving in the Parliament of Provence. Her father, from the merchant class, was head of the local postal system. She learned quite naturally to align herself with the people’s causes and in strictly divided class-conscious Aix, Louise’s aristocrat mother directed her family to walk on the side of the promenade for ordinary people rather than the elite side of the Cours Mirabeau, the “see and be scene” promenade in Aix, even though they were certainly entitled to walk with the local aristocracy. The Fonds Louise Colet, her papers and other archival material from Louise Colet ‘s life and work, is housed in the Médiathèque Ceccano section of the Bibliotheque Municipale d’Avignon.
The Musée Calvet in Avignon preserves Colet memorabilia, according to the acknowledgements in du Plessix Gray’s book, but I was not able to successfully search for items related to Louise Colet using the search function on the museum website. It’s likely material related to Louise Colet would be in a museum archive or library, rather than part of the collection on view digitally.
During her years in Paris, Colet lived in several different apartments, as might be expected for a single mother supporting herself with free-lance writing and literary stipends from the government. Louise Colet lived at 21 rue de Sèvres during the time she hosted her own literary salon, then very much in vogue. This apartment was not far from L’Abbaye aux Bois where Madame Récamier conducted her famous artistic and philosophical discussions until 1849. Colet had a falling out with her friend over the usual miscommunications and misunderstandings. Colet also lived at 21 rue Neuve Fontaine Saint-Georges (rue Fromentin). It was in this lodging in Montmartre where she decided to separate in 1842 after living briefly with her spouse, the musician Hippolyte Colet.
Louise Colet died March 8, 1876 in her daughter’s apartment, rue des Ecoles in Paris, although some books report that she died in a small hotel on that street. During the previous summer in Paris, Colet’s letters of the period were written from the Hotel d’ Angleterre, Rue Jacob and the Hotel du Palais-Royal, Rue de Rivoli. Contrary to her wishes, she was buried with Catholic Church ceremonial pomp that she despised, in daughter Henriette Colet Bissieu’s (her husband)’s family plot in the municipal cemetery in Verneuil, Normandy. The Bissieu family estate was named “Fryleuse” and is located in or near Verneuil. It is likely that the town “Verneuil” refers to Verneuil-sur-Avre which is in Normandy.
Beyond her writing, fired-up feminist rhetoric and long friendship with Gustave Flaubert, Louise Colet took on the Vatican and launched a public relations campaign on behalf of the mid-19th century freedom fighters Garibaldi and Cavour.
During her months in Italy, Louise Colet followed the footsteps of writers she admired, frequenting Caffe Florian in Piazza San Marco, Venice and searching for the exact rooms in the Hotel Nani (later, the Hotel Danieli) where writer George Sand and her lover Alfred Musset lived and worked decades earlier in 1833-1834.
But Colet’s main mission was to shine a light on the efforts of Cavour and Garibaldi to create a unified Italy. Their efforts to unify the fiefdoms and city-states of the Italian peninsula challenged the temporal power of the Vatican. Papal States scattered throughout the peninsula we now call Italy were gradually being brought under the unifying rule of Victor Emanuel; democratic government would follow unification. Colet used her considerable literary fame to seek meetings with key members of the Vatican government.
Francine du Plessix Gray writes:
“In February of 1861, after visits to Sicily that inspired many more pages of art history, Louise Colet left Naples for Rome. Victor Emmanuel had vastly diminished the Papal States the previous autumn when he occupied the Marches and Umbria, as Garibaldi had wished to do. The papal territory was reduced to the city of Rome, where the entrenched conservative factions had grown more bitter. The city was rife with secret police that kept watch on antipapist elements; one of its targets, in the first months of 1861, was Louise Colet. As soon as she had settled at the Hôtel Inghilterra – a lovely hostelry still standing today on the Via Bocca del Leone, two blocks from the Spanish Steps – she was warned by one of her compatriots, a bookstore owner, that she was under police surveillance.
The warning left her undaunted She was determined to remain in Rome = whose antiquities thrilled her as its religious artifacts horrified her = to continue her campaign against the Catholic clergy, which she considered to be the principal enemy of human progress.
Louise’s anticlericalism was fanned by a pope who was one of the more repressive Catholic leaders of the post-Reformation era and whose pontificate was the longest in the history of the papacy (1846 – 1878). Although he had begun as a fairly liberal reformist, Pius IX became an arch conservative in the 1850s, when Cavour attempted to limit his temporal power. He militantly opposed every goal of the Risorgimento, and his reign was defined by two of the most regressive encyclicals of papal history, those that set forth the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.
When she arrived in Rome, Louise immediately set off to visit the Vatican, where she assisted at a Mass officiated by Pius IX in the Sistine Chapel. She describes the obese little Pope, his thick head doddering over a swollen neck, his muddy eyes and weak lips, his blotched red face and powdered hair, the archaic pomp with which his chair is carried into the church by fourteen papal guards. She considered the basilica of Saint Peter a site “of glacial pomp … totally devoid of any mysticism or mystery.” With the exception of the Pietà of Michelangelo, who “would have been a far greater artist if he had fawned less upon illiterate pontiffs,” the basilica’s “overabundance of riches” was a “a monument to hypocrisy … catering to the taste of parvenus and bankers.”
Louise was particularly disgusted with the opulent tomb of Queen Christina of Sweden – “a ruler more pagan in her mores than those of pre-Christian times” – whose recently published letters had revealed her to be “a thief, a violent, insolent and debauched strumpet.” In the middle of Saint Peter’s, Louise shouted, “I protest this sanctification of Christina of Sweden! As a saint,as one of the truly just, I far prefer Garibaldi!” Her outburst terrified a priest, who took to his heels and rushed back into the depths of the basilica.
Later that month, she wrote a burlesque of a Holy Week Mass at Saint Peter’s, which re-created the Last Supper: The Holy Father himself served food to the thirteen beggars who were seated at the table as stand-ins for Christ and his apostles. At the end of the liturgy, a few seconds after the Pope had left the church, a group of fat monks rushed to the altar, chased out the beggars, and stuffed the food and wine into large baskets for their own use (Louise’s description of Rome’s decadent religious mores occasionally strain the imagination).
Visiting the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Louise was prompted to make her own profession of faith, in which she revels a nonsectarian piety. She was, in fact, a Diest: She believed in a Supreme Being but maintained that the truths of this “Implacable Unknown” could not be incarnated in any temporal sect or power. Her credo was a blend of the ideologies that had influenced her since youth – her maternal grandfather’s Voltarian skepticism, Victor Cousin’s eclectic mysticism, Alfred de Vigny’s Stoicism, Victor Hugo’s catchall pantheism.
“Although I long ago left the Catholic faith [she wrote in the fourth and final volume of L’Italie des Italiens’, I enjoy meditating whenever I can in a great empty basilica. I do not feel as much communion with infinity there as I do when gazing on a beautiful starry night or the immensity of the ocean; but I cannot enter into one of these temples which a succession of religious sects erected to their gods without feeling a sorrowful compassion concerning our finitude.
… In our time the human soul is stifled by Catholicism, an antihuman doctrine whose architects suppressed all air and light … Liberty, Justice, Charity, Science, and Chastity have been no more than ringing words in the mouthpiece of the Church. … and at this very hour, the forces of liberty and justice shout out against the Church through all the voices of the Italian fatherland: “Why do you deny our liberation?” ”
These are the opinions with which Louise assaulted Cardinal Antonelli, Prime Minister of the Papal States, one of the Church’s highest-ranking prelates, when she cornered him at the Vatican in an attempt to obtain an audience with the Pope. It was a few days before her return to France, and Louise had a grand purpose in desiring to talk with the Holy Father. She wished to convert Pius IX to the cause of Italian liberation, to the side of Garibaldi and Cavour!
Sitting so close to her that his frock touched her dress, the cardinal, who wore immense rings of square-cut emeralds, addressed Louise as “cara mia” and heard her out but was not in the least swayed. “The Church,” he told her, “cannot recognize the people’s novel claim to emancipation, which of course is no more than the right to rape and murder. The meaningless concepts of ‘patriotism,’ ‘liberty,’ or ‘universal suffrage’ can only be brought about by violence.” Nor did the prelate rush to get Louise an audience with Pius. She had given him three days to arrange the meeting, and the cardinal explained that the Holy Father did not accept ultimatums. Thus were we deprived of a colorful episode – Louise Colet preaching revolution to the most reactionary Pope of modern times.
Louise left Rome for Paris in the spring of 1861, after a year and eight months in Italy. She would soon grieve over Camillo Cavour, who died suddenly, at fifty-one, a few weeks after she returned to France. But the revolutionary goals Cavour pursued had been fulfilled. All of the Italian peninsula, with the exclusion of Rome, had voted to be annexed to Victor Emmanuel’s kingdom. In March, at a parliamentary session in Turin, Victor Emmanuel II proclaimed the birth of a united kingdom of Italy.
…
The venom in Louise’s pen, and the biting social satire that Flaubert considered to be her greatest literary talent, increased in her later years. “Please accept the assurance of my most perfect disdain,” she signed letters to some of her antagonists.
Source: Gray, Francine du Plessix. (1994) Rage & Fire : A Life of Louise Colet. New York: Simon & Schuster, pp 307-310
This similar version of this review appeared in the grass-roots book newspaper The Bloomsbury Review. Subscribe!
Wherever I Wander
Wherever I Wander Book Cover
Judith Azrael
Impassio Press, Seattle, Wa.
2004, 302 pages
$17. paperback
ISBN 0-9711583-4-7
When I picked up Judith Azrael’s collection of essays, I wondered if this would be another memoir by another lyrical questing Buddhist watching the self in stillness and motion. After all, that “I” in the title portends self-involvement.
Instead, this reader entered a world of meticulous attention to the other. Azreal constructs clear portraits of the other consciousnesses — people, animals, environments — that she encounters. The author spends her words carefully, crafting details that compose places; her writing is grounded in sensual information. Though she reveals herself ever so gradually, the real focus of the book is on the other, whether that other is an abandoned baby seal, a group of prisoners, a house or the sea.
In The Art of Grace, Pulitzer Prize winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman explores the meaning of moving gracefully.
WorldReader 