October 9-15, 2003

cover story

BQ Shorts NONFICTION

The Shadow Club

By Roberto Casati Knopf, 230 pp., $24

A melding of astronomy, history and philosophy into a singular treatise, The Shadow Club tackles the surprisingly well-explored subject of this dark phenomenon and culls all the tidbits into one skinny spine. Omnipresent -- even at night if you look at the moon -- but never tangible, the ’black stain’ (literal translation from American Sign Language) is constantly lurking about. The shadow has even acted as a history marker. When the atomic bomb devastated Hiroshima, a Japanese man who was waiting for a bank to open was disintegrated; the only remnant of his existence was his shadow left permanently on the bank building. And then there’s the lesson about never pilfering a sundial like the Romans did in 264 B.C., because once you alter the clock’s latitude, it’s no longer accurate. So the Romans’ first public clock, stolen from Sicily, had the citizens functioning by the wrong time for 99 years. And if you’re going to claim you reached the North Pole like Robert Peary did, make sure that victory flag you stab into a mound of ice and snow casts the correct shadow at a certain time during a particular season. You could predict the length of that Arctic shadow from a Caribbean beach with a Bahama Mama in your grasp 20 years before you ever set foot in those ice cleats. Shadows are infallible and give you away; you can’t trick them, they’re calculable backwards and forwards in time.

After reading this book, you might be ’afraid of your own shadow’ for a whole set of other reasons, like how complicated a simple thing we take for granted really can be. Author Roberto Casati covers the breadth: everything you ever wanted to know but were too lazy to find out for yourself. The info is dense, sometimes dry, but gleaning the colorful parts can make you sound quite erudite at a dinner party. —Helen i-lin Hwang

A Venetian Affair

By Andrea di Robilant Knopf, 314 pp., $24

The comparisons are inevitable: It&Mac185;s Romeo and Juliet or Pygmalion -- it’s even Jungle Fever. These are obvious and yet unfair, for Andrea di Robilant’s first book is delicious and unique, marrying the vicarious thrill of reading someone else’s love letters with the socio-historical color of Casanova’s 18th-century Venice. The cherry on top is that it’s all true. Or purported to be, and anyway, who cares? Even though we know that our hero and di Robilant’s ancestor, Andrea Memmo, and our heroine, Giustiniana Wynne, had virtually no chance of a happy ending due to differences in social standing, we’re on tenterhooks all the same. Di Robilant knows the outcome; he’s read all the letters his father found in the attic of the family’s palazzo, as well as history books and memoirs aplenty. The fact that these are -- or were, 250 years ago -- real people makes the whole thing that much more satisfying: Giustiniana is plagued with bouts of jealousy over Memmo’s flirtations with fetching ladies from good families; Memmo is impatient with Giustiniana and given to ’misogynistic musings.’ No storybook star-crosseds, these.

When the two met in 1753, they were hardly able to look at each other without arousing the suspicion of society in general and Giustiniana’s mother in particular. And yet, exchanging glances was all they had. Di Robilant explains: ’It is easy to imagine how, in a city where both men and women wore masks during a good portion of the year, the language of the eyes would become all important.’ Indeed, the relationship begins innocently; each writes in forbidden letters that simply glimpsing the other is desire fulfilled. Di Robilant takes us from the pure beginnings of their relationship, through consummation (we are treated to the description of Memmo’s fondness for ’sending small samples of his semen to [Giustiniana] as a tangible sign of his love’) to their hopeless and increasingly bizarre schemes to live happily ever after. Fortunately, di Robilant spares us the mundane planning that goes into clandestine affairs (’Much was written about the dropping off and picking up of keys’) and goes heavy on the intrigue. It works. Our guide confesses that while writing, he found himself ’slipping back in time so effortlessly that I didn’t know what century I was living in anymore.’ We get lost too. —Nancy Armstrong

Andrea di Robilant reads Thu., Oct. 16, 6 p.m., free, Borders, 1 S. Broad St., 215-568-7400.

Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood

By Julie Gregory Bantam, 244 pp., $24.95

Julie Gregory spent her childhood going to different doctors, taking lots of pills and having dozens of increasingly invasive medical tests performed on her in her mother’s quest to find out exactly what was wrong with her. The answer was: her mother. Gregory was a victim of an oft-misunderstood syndrome, Munchausen by proxy. Essentially, in a case of MBP, a parent (usually the mother) makes his or her child ill. Unlike cut-and-dried movie or television representations of MBP, where mothers slip poison into their children’s food, Gregory’s mother poisoned her emotionally, inventing or exaggerating symptoms to doctor after doctor and forcing Gregory to confirm these symptoms, with the resulting tests and unnecessary medication making Gregory feel as sick as her mother said she was. As for the motivation for this particularly cruel form of child abuse, Gregory’s mother seemed to feed off of the attention she got from the doctors, who were impressed by her dedication to helping her sick child, or the scraps of sympathy she could receive from her less-than-attentive husband. Gregory tells her often-horrific tale simply, beginning through the eyes of a child. As Gregory gets to her teen years, the story opens up with a wider perspective, one that begins to understand all that has happened to her. Both views are gut wrenching, though Gregory is particularly skilled in her re-creations of a child’s selective way of seeing and telling a story, as well as showing how what seems to be a simple medical procedure can terrorize a confused and healthy kid. Gregory also details her mother’s history and the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her family. Though reading this text sometimes feels like rubbernecking at a bad accident, the details serve to create a rich portrait of a troubled family, and put a human face on what seems to many a most unimaginable situation. —Debra Auspitz

Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America

By Eric Rauchway Hill & Wang, 250 pp., $25

’Today, at a century’s distance, we can still watch,’ Eric Rauchway says of 40 seconds of film shot by the Thomas A. Edison Company on Sept. 6, 1901 (footage you can download from the Library of Congress website). ’[We] can see the flickering images of onlookers, most with no hope of getting through the mass of their fellows, standing horrified and still. ... One man, thoroughly respectable in his pince-nez, bowler and brush mustache, turns idly, catches sight of the camera, looks directly into the lens -- and suddenly smiles before turning away.’ Only several feet away, in the Temple of Music at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, President William McKinley has just been shot. After eight days he will die.

Modern historians often give the McKinley assassination short shrift; McKinley was not a charismatic leader, and his killing didn’t inspire J.F.K.-level conspiracy theories. The assassin, factory worker Leon Czolgosz (pronounced ’Chol-gosh,’ incidentally), was apprehended at the scene and convicted and executed within eight weeks of the shooting. But Rauchway puts the assassination in a larger social and geopolitical context.

Czolgosz, son of Eastern European immigrants, was enamored of the radical Emma Goldman and fancied himself an anarchist, at a time when anarchism was a genuine political threat. The Haymarket riots in 1886 Chicago were fresh in most Americans’ memories, and in the decade before McKinley’s death, Rauchway reminds us, ’the Spanish prime minister Canovas del Castillo, the French president Sadi Carnot, the Hapsburg empress Elizabeth and the Italian king Umberto I had all been assassinated by anarchists.’ Throw in the fact that McKinley was the third American president assassinated in just 36 years, and turn-of-the-century America was obviously as volatile and violent as the 1960s.

Murdering McKinley also illustrates what happened in Washington after the assassination. Teddy Roosevelt had been a rising revolutionary in the Republican party when GOP bosses made him McKinley’s vice president to render him impotent. Now president, the 42-year-old Roosevelt defied his base by breaking up trusts, supporting labor (while cracking down on labor violence) and enacting progressive policies.

Murdering McKinley works as both a history lesson and an engaging read. Rauchway’s compelling narration draws implicit parallels between 1901 and today. If the anonymous mustached gentleman in Edison’s on-the-spot movie stares out at us, Rauchway dares us to stare right back. —Andrew Milner

Eleonora Duse: A Biography

By Helen Sheehy Knopf, 380 pp., $32.50

Actors -- perhaps by necessity, perhaps just prior to the advent of Us Weekly -- are perceived as silent, reflective canvases, without their own clear aims. So it is heartening to read of one performer who daringly smashed the mask, who once described herself as ’one person full of words.’

From her debut on the Italian stage with her family’s theater company at age 8 to her striking performances in works by pre-eminent 19th-century European writers, Eleonora Duse embodied theater’s very development: As a child, she toured gruelingly with the company; as a young woman, she declared the passive, melodramatic styles of acting prevalent at the time an affront, and championed ’verismo,’ naturalistic performance; and as a grande dame, she was escorted by fellows of the artistic establishment, notably Auguste Rodin.

Yet she would not read her own biographies: To her, an actress’ purpose must be ’to live her art, not comment on it.’ Helen Sheehy’s recent comprehensive tome benefits, then, from Duse’s abetting, through inclusion of letters, reviews and photographs of her command performances, as Ophelia and as the title in Dumas’ Denise. Genuinely startling to audiences after the postured method epitomized by Sarah Bernhardt, Duse’s contemporary, these roles were played with emotion, in diaphanous costumes: Her name, with its Italian pronunciation, has become synonymous with something stunning, a ’doozy,’ we might say.

For all her stage presence, Duse comes across as one wracked with vacillating self-doubt -- largely in the wash of failed romances and of bearing a child out of wedlock, then referred to in Italy as a figlio di colpa, ’child of guilt.’ (This birth was echoed in Dumas’ plot for Denise.) Her uncommon position as both muse and actor is explored by Sheehy, who refers to Duse’s roles as ’Duse/Denise,’ for example. It’s clear Duse poured herself into parts -- but she came to realize, painfully, that the forgiving catharsis she found in those onstage guises was withheld from society’s tragic women. In one of her characteristically oddly punctuated letters, she exclaims: ’Art ... and the life of the theatre ... God, what an abyss between them!’ —Juliet Fletcher