Book review: The Baroness by Hannah Rothschild

If you’re looking for an in-depth look into the life and times of the Rothschilds or indeed, of a significant member of this infamous family, this ain’t it.

If you want a light read about a woman who lived in interesting times, then this is ok.  But I’m not going to recommend it to anyone.

The Baroness is a superficial biography of Pannonica Rothschild, born into the English branch of the family when Rothschild was a byword for big money and grand spending. She made a good marriage, had children then left her husband of 15 years to live in New York and obsess about jazz. There you have it.

Sure, there is more to her life story than that, but what Hannah Rothschild (a relative of Pannonica or ‘Nica’) has written is a simple, conversational pseudo- account of a life that could have been fascinating. Unfortunately, the friendly-biographer style of Rothschild, constantly referring to ‘when I interviewed Aunt Miriam', combined with either a lack of good information about Nica or a lack of research, means that this book feels short on both professionalism and those delicious details that allow the personalities of the individuals to leap off the page and engage you in their stories.

Nica as a young woman. 

Rothschild provides just enough historical detail to paint the picture of who the Rothschilds are, where they came from, and what they do. There can be little doubt that her insider knowledge and probable unrivaled access to Rothschild family members and paper has given this book a nice personal touch.

There are few people in this world born into the privilege that many Rothschild children receive. While it is true that with that privilege comes expectations, the weight of history and a version of ‘lack of freedom’, many people, including myself, would be happy to be born into such a world of wealth and connections.

Nica's Bentley. The Bentley and 'The Baroness' became icons in the down-and-out jazz scene of 50s and 60s New York.

Nica Rothschild came across as a character but also an almost cookie-cutter product of her time and class. The author would violently oppose this view, I am sure. However I felt that as much as she was a ‘rebel’, Nica’s unabashed confidence, brashness, spending and don’t-give-a-damn attitude are very much by-products of belonging to a class where you could afford to act that way.

Nica’s great act of rebellion - leaving her unhappy marriage to become a matriarch of the New York jazz scene in the 50s and 60s - led her down an un-trodden path and brought her into contact with some of the greatest musicians of the 20^th Century. Most notably Thelonius Monk, the jazz genius, drug addict and troubled soul who became the great obsession of Nica’s life. Interesting, yes. Rebellion? Not really. Not if you think of other society ladies who break free from expectations – people such as Jane Digby or the Mitford girls. Maybe I’m missing the point and not really allowing myself to be impressed. However, it seems to me that when you can keep hold or your Bentley, pearls and furs while patronising all and sundry in the New York underground, life can’t be that tough.

 Nica and Thelonious Monk - the great obsession of her life.

I have read some biographies of society ladies; people who seemingly live quite shallow, uninteresting lives. However, the details that are revealed and the personalities that are allowed to come through the writer’s words create interest in their stories. To gloss over an incident is to make it ordinary: 'Oh, they stole light aircraft from the army and flew over Africa, one time landing amongst a tribe of pygmies' sounds almost commonplace when you don’t put any layers into the event. It is the impressions, the people and the details that make a story worth reading and that is what is lacking in this university assignment of a book.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. I do tend to judge more severely a book that doesn’t engage me and I did not want to pick up The Baroness once I’d started it. However, to each their own and if you want a light-hearted portrait of an interesting woman, look at this book.

Meanwhile – can anyone recommend a good history of the Rothschild family? I’d love to read one.

Book review: My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

I’m not sure what I was expecting of My Hundred Lovers. Some salacious, juicy tales and a few life lessons in love perhaps. However, My Hundred Lovers is so much more than that and as a result, is a delight of a book.

My Hundred Lovers is an erotic journey. I don’t mean just the sensuality of flesh on flesh, but the eroticism of sensation. The taste of wine on the tongue, the feel of soft mud between your toes, the kiss of the ocean on the skin. All of them stimulating and sensual, sensations that you delight in and yearn for when they’ve been and gone. Feelings such as this are of the sort everyone can relate to, even if we don’t recognise them in the way that Johnson describes. Some of her ‘loves’ reminded me a little of the start of the film Amelie and the character descriptions that include loves and hates, like the feeling of dipping your hand into a sack of dried legumes. I do enjoy that sensation myself, as I enjoy exquisitely fine dark chocolates and the feeling of freshly clean skin. If I were to write of my hundred lovers, those are the sorts of sensations I might include.

Susan Johnson’s poetic language took me a little by surprise and to be honest, rather put me off to start with. I’m not a natural born romantic and the one time in my life I was asked to write a love letter – in an airport as we were about to part after a romantic getaway together – I floundered completely.  That may have been the bad timing. Nevertheless, sentences such as 'Everything is coming together: the past, the future, memory, forgetting. A circumstantial joining, a burst, a throb.' threw me a little. However, as Johnson drifts into less metaphysical experiences, her language becomes more prosaic. 

My Hundred Lovers is a beautiful, sensual tour through the photo album of one woman’s memories. It was a delightful, easy read that tingles your mind to think about the erotic moments of your own life. I found I kept putting the book down at the end of chapters to contemplate what Johnson had written and think about similar experiences I might have had. In this way, it is not only a visit to one women’s sensual life journey, but an invitation to look back on your own life and smile at all the pleasurable moments you have enjoyed.

I hate to bring this up as a comparison, but to all my girlfriends who have read 50 Shades of Grey – pick this book up instead. Here is genuine erotica at its subtle suggestive best.

Book review: The Churchills by Mary S. Lovell

While in Maleny over the Easter weekend I wandered into Rosetta Bookshop and as per usual I bought a few books, including The Churchills by Mary S. Lovell.

I bought the book not from any great desire to read about the Churchills but because I have read and enjoyed almost all of Lovell's previous biographies. Choosing slightly off-centre but nevertheless fascinating subjects, Lovell tells the personal sagas eruditely, striking just the right balance between private detail and drama and insight into the world in which they lived and shaped.

When I first picked up the book I thought it would span a greater number of generations than it does. Though starting with John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough and builder of the family seat Blenheim Palace (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site), the action then skips a century or two to the grandfather of Winston Churchill, around whom the majority of the story revolves. 

The family pile: Blenheim Palace. 

Not that there isn't enough going on in the three generations centred around Winston. His mother was the first of the 'dollar princesses' – the flood of wealthy American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy in the 19thC, bringing dowries to prop up the money-poor Barons, Dukes and Earls in exchange for a title and respectability they could never find back home. In just four generations we learn of innumerable affairs, divorces, illnesses and of course, the huge personality of Winston Churchill and the incredibly journey of his life. 

 'Sunny' Marlborough, 9th Duke and his Duchess, Consuelo Vanderbilt, the most famous of the 'Dollar Princesses' whose money saved Blenheim Palace.

This is not a political biography, it is not a war biography. Lovell's focus from page 1 is the private lives of these tumultuous people. Aside from Winston, people who really stood out for me were his mother Jennie, beautiful and charismatic, who made a rare happy marriage and who moved at the epi-centre of British Society for decades and also Winston's son Randolph, intensely unlike-able on the page despite the author's assurances that he could have great person charm in life.

Winston and Clementine Churchill.

Sitting on my bookshelves right now are biographies on The Mitford Girls – six sisters who exemplified the political spectrum of the 20thC from Nazism, Fascism, Communism to the very peak of the British aristocracy; Beryl Markham, pioneering aviatrix, racing horse trainer, explosive personality and the first person to fly from England to America; Jane Digby, 19^thC aristocratic wife who ended her life as the wife of a Bedouin Sheikh in the sands of Syria; and finally Bess of Hardwick, independent landowner and the first Duchess of Devonshire who built Chatworth and was the second most powerful woman in Tudor England aside from Queen Elizabeth. I recommend all of these biographies because they are well researched yet easy to read and genuinely fascinating. 

The Churchills is a great read and a intriguing look into a history-making family. 

Dangerous Glitter

If you're at all interested in music writing, like I am, Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, by Dave Thompson, is a must-read. It's a three-way biography; a recounting of the intertwining lives of Bowie, Reed and Pop in the 1970s, discussing their ups and downs, their friendships and fallings out, collaborations, hangers on, and most importantly, their influences on each other as well as the rest of the music world.

The book begins in the prologue with Nico's first meeting with Andy Warhol, but the first chapter begins with Lou Reed's days in Detroit in 1975. It traces the three of them fairly evenly, devoting equal weight to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed's later solo career, to David Bowie's albums and mammoth US tours, and also to Iggy and The Stooges. The whole book is essentially chronological, a deceptively simple re-telling of what happened, who was there, and what the fallout was. I say deceptively, because it's clear that Thompson would have had an enormous amount of material to work with, and the fact that he created a book so measured and concise is impressive.

The whole thing is very well-written, actually, with just the right mix of interesting facts, engaging descriptions of the people involved, and gossipy melodrama. Bowie, Pop and Reed are given equal treatment - roughly the same amount of "screen time" - without any visible bias or preferential treatment of one over the other. There's no sugar-coating of their behaviour, but also no judgement of the things they did or the way they treated themselves and others. There is some discussion of the legendary partying, drug addiction and debauchery that these three are famous for, but it never seems to overshadow the impact and importance of their music and their effect on their fans.

In fact, I found there was less drug talk than I was expecting. Thompson really only talks about the partying when it influenced the music, or when it became a definite problem, like Bowie's slide into cocaine-fuelled crazy, or Iggy and Reed's respective heroin addictions and the effect they had on their ability to produce music.

One criticism of this book might be its brevity. At only 300 pages, it's a swift read, and Thompson certainly packs a lot in. Do three artists of this calibre deserve a longer study? Maybe. However, while more serious and dedicated fans might want more detail, I was pretty happy with the length and depth available in this book. I felt Thompson had encapsulated the up and down relationships between these three men, and the up and down flow of the rock and roll industry of the era, remarkably well, without getting bogged down in the minutiae.

Overall verdict: easy to read, deeply interesting, no sugar-coating or hyperbole. Two thumbs up from me!

Book review: Turkestan Solo by Ella Maillart

As the book jacket says, long before travel to Central Asia was fashionable Ella Maillart did it. Throughout the 1930's, she journeyed across China, from Peking to Srinagar with fellow journalist Peter Fleming; from Geneva to Kabul and reported for international newspapers from Turkey, Iran and Afganistan. During the 1930's. As a woman. We're impressed when women do this today, 80 years later. To top of her extraordinary story during the 20' she was an international skier, on the Swiss hockey team and competed in the 1924 Olympics.

As a book, it's interesting. At the beginning, it reads a little strangely. I think that's more because the voice and style are so different from what travel journals sound like nowadays. Moving on from that, you have to be impressed by what she did. She skied to the top of a mountain 5 people had climbed. Ever. She travels to places that most of us will never see, even now. She meets amazing people and chronicles what ordinary life is like on the steppes of Kazakstan in yurts eating precious potatoes.

She talks a bit about adventure, seeing places before they become something else – a country in line with those around it, a 'modern' place. The advance of Communism is coming to Central Asia and with it huge changes. She saw these amazing places when they were still places one journeyed to. As far as I'm concerned, going to Kazakstan and Bokhara and Samarkand is still an adventure, let alone by myself 80 years ago. I want to go to the last 2 cities, by the way.

Her many books and photographs are considered important historical records of a time and place and come from her unique view point as one of the first 'tourists' in the countries she visits.

If you see any of Ella Maillart's books you should pick them up and read them. She writes intimately about places we can still visit and maybe see a little of life 100 years ago even if there are traffic lights and tall buildings and progress.