How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying

 

How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying / Lara Marlowe
NY: Melville House, c2025.
312 p.

This is the story of Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko, as told by journalist Lara Marlowe. Mykytenko served in the Ukrainian armed forces, but was no longer serving when the full-scale invasion began. She knew immediately that she had to return, and re-enlisted just days later. 

This is a powerful story of her work in the armed forces, as a commander of a unit. Those who think women are not part of the Ukrainian army are sadly mistaken; this book shows how many ways that women are working with and for the Ukrainian armed forces, for the defense of Ukraine. 

I was interested to read a bit of a different perspective here, from a women who had served both previously and in this current moment. She is a long-time serviceperson and has so much experience that she has comparisons to make and a deep understanding of patterns and decisions. So she doesn't fawn over the current government, she sees that there are things that will need changing within Ukrainian society, but after this current existential threat is over. 

She is no-nonsense as well, she just gets things done and avoids unnecessary drama. Her story is another perspective on what happened starting in February 2022, from a demographic I haven't heard directly from before. I thought that Lara Marlowe, a war journalist from the US and France, did a good job of getting Mykytenko's voice across and finding the right details to fill out this story. Illuminating and engaging, there are no dry reportage bits here. Just a very personal and thoughtful sketch of a woman's experience in wartime. 

Anna

 

Anna: the biography / Amy Odell
NY: Gallery Books, c2022
447 p.

I've always been intrigued by Anna Wintour, and since this new biography arrived in my library I thought I'd grab it -- it's an authorized bio, and very lengthy, but not gossipy like earlier unauthorized attempts at writing about Wintour. 

It's quite thorough, beginning with Anna Wintour as a child; it talks about her family beginnings and her parents, explaining how both their personalities and their family backgrounds and careers affected Anna's direction. Unlike her siblings, she was more interested in fashion and journalism than university, and once she found her direction she went for it with precise aim. 

It covers all her early jobs and how they shaped her career in magazines, both by her successes and by those places and roles that she wasn't so successful at. It was interesting to see that here was somebody with a distinct vision and a particular personality, who wasn't too good at all the things that people are supposed to do to "pay their dues", but was superb at the role she wanted and finally got - editor of Vogue. 

She found early on that she didn't like many of the elements of a fashion job; going out on site as the producer of a shoot wasn't for her, and many of the daily grind kind of things weren't either. It was running the show and shaping the vision for the magazine that she wanted and was really good at. This kind of focus on doing what she wanted to be doing was interesting to me - how did she keep on with everything else in the meantime? I guess thinking about it as a step toward the ultimate goal. 

Anyhow, the book does talk about her personal relationships to a degree, and does point out some of the missteps she made at other magazines as well as the one or two big errors at Vogue. But it was written by a fashion insider (Odell is the editor of Cosmopolitan.com) and depends heavily on interviews with friends and family, as well as being okayed by Wintour, so there isn't too deep of a discussion of the various criticisms she's faced over the years. 

Along with the personal, there's quite a bit about the workings of the fashion world in general, and about Condé Nast in particular. A reader finds out a lot about the bosses and the work culture at this magazine consortium, and my lord, you'd have to have a thick skin to make it there. I've noticed that Anna Wintour was not front and centre at every runway show in the past while, and wondered about it, but here I discovered that she is no longer the editor of Vogue but the overall content manager for Condé Nast as a whole -- so now it makes sense. 

If you're also interested in fashion journalism and the history of Vogue magazine, and have a fascination with Anna Wintour like I do, this is a good read. Lots to think about here even if it isn't an "exposé" of anything, but more of a putting on record of Wintour's career overall. I feel like it did a good job of tracing her personality and how it developed and worked for her (and against her) in her chosen field. And it also pointed out how many of those traits were only criticized or examined because she was a powerful woman - many men in the same roles were far worse but never got a comment on their leadership at all. Fascinating read about a huge figure in the fashion world, I enjoyed it. 

Threads: the Delicate Life of John Craske

Threads: the Delicate Life of John Craske / Julia Blackburn
London: Jonathan Cape, c2015.
352 p.

I heard about this book in the bibliography of a craft book I was studying, and thought it sounded intriguing enough to track down via Interlibrary Loan. It delivered, though not in the way I was first expecting.

It is a delicate biography, mostly because it isn't one at all. The author decides to write about this intriguing character, John Craske (b1887, d1943) but finds that there isn't all that much to discover. The book is about more than Craske himself; it's also about her search for him -- the places she goes to do her research, the people she encounters along the way, related to Craske or not, and her own life story is inextricably linked to the narrative, as her husband dies during the course of her writing this book.

It is fascinating and absorbing reading. 

John Craske himself, the backbone of the book, was an English fisherman from Norfolk who suffered from an undiagnosed disease (they think now it may have been some kind of diabetes). He would fall into long periods of invalidism, in which he seemed not to be in the world at all. His wife encouraged him to paint in order to engage with the world, and feel as if he was on the open seas again, which he missed. Visitors noted that all the surfaces of their house were covered with paintings propped up, and even painted right onto the doors and windowsills. When John became too ill to be able to paint, his wife set him onto embroidery, which he could do from his bed. 

His embroideries were fresh and unique; he used his painting techniques to make embroidered images of the seascapes he loved. As a stitcher myself  I could see how these were unusual for the time, being freeform and individual. He uses his wools and threads to indicate wind, waves, grasses, and more; the movement in his stitching is extraordinary. He was working on a huge panel depicting Dunkirk when he died, leaving only a square of the sky undone. 

Blackburn examines not only his life history and the ways in which he turned to painting and then embroidery, but also what happened to his works after he'd died, and the ways in which his reputation was both made and forgotten. Integral to his brief popularity were the writers Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, who discovered him in his small village, and championed his art after that -- partly out of admiration and partly out of a feeling that he and his wife really needed some financial support. 

Blackburn also visits a couple of small regional museums and institutions that hold a few of Craske's remaining works, finding them poorly stored, not exhibited, or shown a lot of care. They seem to treat them as the output of a local artisan, not worth too much attention. I hope that this book can at least inspire those places to preserve Craske's work for the future, as they are original. 

The book as a whole feels wild and windy, with a lot of open spaces to think and ponder. One of the things John Craske said about being out on the ocean in a small boat was that it made you feel like a small bit of the world; this book's wide-ranging interest and narrative structure also makes you, the reader, feel like one small point in a huge tapestry of life. This was a wonderful, rambling discovery.