Advertisement

Discoveries

Share

The True Memoirs of Little K by Adrienne Sharp (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 373 pp., $25) Sit back and be told a story, the rich and fantastic memoirs of 99-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska, ballerina with the Russian Imperial Ballet, mistress to tsars and grand dukes. They called her Little K — she was the daughter of a great dancer and she grew up in the fin de siècle Romanov court. . The Romanov dukes and princes chose their mistresses from the ballet and theater. But Little K made her own choice — set her determined sights on the young tsarevich Nicholas Romanov. When he chose a different wife, Little K became his mistress. This slender heroine of Adrienne Sharp’s novel moves through her life as corrupt courts and Russian winters swirl around her: “There are no words to explain the cold of a Petersburg winter,” she recalls from her Paris apartment half a century later. “The lights from the palace lit up a black and white world — brittle ice and flakes and drifts of snow, the steaming black breath from the horses and waiting men.” It’s a love story, a triumph of will, set in a Chekhovian landscape. Perfect holiday reading. The artist ends (like Akhmatova and countless others) an enemy of the state, banished from history. She tells her story in an almost magical way — the reader dissolves into another time and place.

The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton: 160 pp., $19.95) There is a mythical, cinematic, “Star Wars” quality to the story of the leafcutter ants’ civilization — something inspiring and deeply thought-provoking. E.O. Wilson has spent a lifetime studying ants, which means he knows how to tell the story (with the help of some extremely clear illustrations) of their highly evolved, half-billion-year-old society to the rest of us. Colonies of the leafcutter ants contain 5 million workers, all born from one queen. These ants “dominate the forests, grasslands, and pastures” of the New World. Wilson calls them “the ultimate superorganism” with the most highly advanced society. This means that “the following criteria are met: cooperative care for immature individuals, overlap of at least two generations in the same society, and the coexistence of reproductive and nonreproductive members.” Wilson, with Bert Holldobler, traces the sources of their ecological dominance, their agriculture, division of labor, cooperative community, health, hygiene and communication.

The Spirit of the Quakers by Geoffrey Durham (Yale University Press: 244 pp., $21.95) Admit that they are fascinating: their insistence that priests and ministers and elaborate churches are not necessary for an individual’s relationship with God, their commitment to positive change and peace in the world. The oldest essays in Geoffrey Durham’s anthology “The Spirit of the Quakers,” date 350 years, to the beginnings of the Quaker movement. Durham directs the reader to the movement´s most articulate members: John Greenleaf Whittier, William Penn, Elizabeth Fry and others. The reader sees what goes on in Quaker meetings; how inspired members have contributed to social change in many areas — women’s suffrage, antiwar movements, civil rights and the environmental movement. Though the Quakers do not emphasize any particular text or dogma, the anthology does include their 42 paragraphs, often published in a pocket-sized edition, called “Advices and Queries.” This is a joyful document, full of simple advice: “live adventurously,” “a simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength,” “think it possible that you may be mistaken.” How compelling and delightful! Deeds, not creeds! “God: the great mirror in which we must see ourselves quietly just as we are, with all our ugliness but with all our hopes.”

Advertisement

Salter Reynolds is a Los Angeles writer.

Advertisement