DISCOVERIES

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The Memoirs of Catherine the Great

Translated from the French by Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom

Modern Library: 248 pp., $26.95

Since 1859, three translations of “The Memoirs of Catherine the Great” have come and gone. This new one is the most faithful to the original text, begun in 1744 when Catherine was 14. She began life as Princess Sophie, the daughter of German nobles. She was sent to Russia to marry Peter III, her cousin and heir to the Russian throne. Her writing reveals an isolated, somewhat lonely girl, reading “Plutarch’s Lives” and Cicero to strengthen her soul.

The memoirs, written in French, are in three main manuscripts, the first begun in 1756 while she was still the grand duchess, stuck in an unhappy marriage but secure at court after having just produced a male heir. “My heart did not foresee great happiness,” she wrote. “Ambition alone sustained me.”

Catherine became empress in 1762, ruling until her death in 1796. The middle memoir was written from 1771 to 1773, while Russia was at war with Turkey and Moscow was riddled with the plague. The third and final memoir was written in 1794, after 50 years in Russia and just after the French Revolution struck fear into the hearts of European nobles.

England’s Elizabeth I may have been her role model, but Catherine was more of a hands-on queen and self-educated philosopher. She is so frank about her desire for power and about her legendary sexual life (including a secret night out dressed as a man) that she seems quite modern, self-assured and in the end, unafraid.

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Kiss & Tango

Looking for Love in Buenos Aires

Marina Palmer

William Morrow: 324 pp., $24.95

This is the true story of how Marina Palmer, mild-mannered ad executive at New York’s Young & Rubicam, found passion on holiday in South America. Just before turning 30, feeling a little blue, Palmer visited cousins in Argentina.

Her first night in Buenos Aires, a city of boulevards and elderly men in white linen suits, where everyone looks gorgeous, she went to a tango party at a local club. She was hooked: “These were not men and women dancing together, these were new creatures born of the union of old men with young women, tall women with short men, skinny men with fat women ... each pairing creating a unique combination of body parts.” She went home, but the tango had set her free, no more clients and their “stupid canned pasta.”

After a few months of tango lessons (which turned her into a very thin night creature who fell asleep in boring ad meetings), Palmer quit and moved to Buenos Aires. There, she danced four to five hours a night, took lessons in the day and tried to become a professional tango dancer. She bought classic tango shoes, wore see-through tops with strappy backs and more or less lived the life of her dreams.

Palmer’s effervescence is so contagious that a reader feels she has actually lived the life (hangovers and all). Armchair tango. Now that’s escape.

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Happiness

The Science Behind Your Smile

Daniel Nettle

Oxford University Press:

216 pp., $21

Buy the couch or go for the resort vacation? Scientists around the world have explored such questions to learn what makes the human animal happy. In “Happiness,” Daniel Nettle translates recent studies on brain systems, dopamine, anti-depressants, hallucinogens and the marketing of happiness.

Nettle considers its sources, from sex to success, and allows that it would be “exhausting to spend all of your waking life full of joy, besides which it could probably only be done with access to a chemistry lab and a great deal of money.” The most we can realistically hope for,” he writes, “is what psychologists call subjective well-being.” He examines the difference between wanting and liking and something called “pleasant activity attaining,” a sort of workout for happiness.

He also quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”