Word: tolstoys
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...ONCE the antidote to post-Christmas exams, the only friend more reliable than the family dog: the fourteen magical days that made all that procrastination possible, Reading Period. And now, it becomes painfully clear, there will be only eleven. During no other now-missing three days will more Tolstoy not be read, more papers not get written, more drawn-out two hour lunches never take place. It may not be dying yet, but Reading Period is becoming only a shadow of its former frenzied self...
...unhappy countries are like Tolstoy's unhappy families; each is miserable in its own way. Even by that standard, the portrait of Fidel Castro's Cuba offered by the exiles whose testimony forms the bulk of this softspoken, yet emotionally gripping documentary is singularly poignant...
...biographer has painted the tumult and suffering of Russia's past more vividly than Henri Troyat, whose previous subjects include Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Catherine the Great. A master of the purposeful anecdote, the graceful accretion of detail that helps explain motive and madness, Troyat finds the key to Ivan's character in the ruler's early life. The heir to the throne of Muscovy was orphaned at seven, and he grew up amid endless scheming by Russia's landed aristocracy, the boyars. "Observing the brutal treatment that grown men inflicted on their fellows...
...scene could be straight from a 19th century novel by Leo Tolstoy. Horse-drawn carts carry cabbages along muddy, unpaved roads. Walking along the riverbank in the low sun, an elderly woman wearing a mobcap carries a yoke on her shoulders, with buckets of water hanging on each end. She is returning to her home, a wooden cabin with no running water, in a village not far from Pomary, an obscure rail siding on the banks of the Volga River, 400 miles east of Moscow. Along the way, she encounters brightly colored blue-and-yellow bulldozers and pipelaying machines...
Chandrasekhar, who got word of the award on his birthday, is a slight, 5-ft. 6-in. scholar with a shy manner, a preference for black suits and a love of Tolstoy, Mozart and Beethoven. Born in Lahore, then part of India, to a prominent Hindu family (his physicist uncle, Sir Chandrasekhara Raman, won a Nobel in 1930), Chandra, as he is called by physicists everywhere, began the work for which he was cited more than a half-century ago. In 1930, when he was only 19 years old, he whiled away the long shipboard hours...