Kate Simon

Etchings in an Hourglass is the sequel to Bronx Primitive and A Wider World. This third volume of Kate Simon's extraordinary memoirs centers around the main people in her later life. Her first husband's illness and death were followed by two bittersweet love affairs and then by the painful death of her daughter - her only child - whose long illness the author describes with her usual blend of empathy and self-restraint. Her younger sister, whom she had helped to raise, also died at this time. Kate's relationship with her second husband grew bitter, and after an illness she entered a hospital, had an abortion, and went into analysis. In the years that followed Kate took up the travels for which she became famous in her books and articles. Here, however, she describes not scenery or architecture but people - especially men - who became friends or lovers and offered marriage or adventure. The book ends with a portrait of the author as she was at the end of her life - well centered, elderly, a bit tired, but still pushing, still entertained.

Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood was chosen as one of the twelve best books of the year by The New York Times in 1982. Now we have Kate Simon's honest, moving, and beautifully written sequel, A Wider World, about growing up in the Depression-ridden but vital New York of the 1930s. With a spirited sense of self-preservation and without a trace of sentimentality, the author explores the wondrous flowering and momentary terrors of her adolescence. In that bittersweet time, the boys never had enough money to take out the girls and the girls often had crushes on each other and their teachers. Sex was strange but fascinating, and eventually led Kate to set up housekeeping with a boy, to her father's horror and the envy of her friends. Birth control was haphazard and abortions were primitive. The need to learn about everything - life, literature, politics, love, the city - was urgent. Kate Simon has remembered it all with great clarity and wry humor. In her remembering, these events might have happened yesterday, were they not so utterly of a time and place. In the immediacy of the emotions that reverberate on every page this memoir is completely contemporary and timeless in its appeal.

The Gonzaga dynasty, which held the dukedom of Mantua in its iron grip for centuries, was as pleasure-loving and internecine as any leading family of Renaissance Italy. Simon nicely captures the excesses and contradictory passions that swept the ducal palace as she chronicles fraternal rivalries, poisonings, bribes of popes, seesaw alignments of warring states. With an eye for telling detail, the well-known travel writer (Kate Simon's Paris) reminds us that the Renaissance was a time when astrologers and alchemists were widely consulted, when the sexual use of little boys at court was common, and when processions carrying saints' images, believed to be the best cure against the plague, only furthered its spread. While the antics of the Gonzagas hold this tapestry together, the spotlight is stolen by culture-heroes such as humanist rebel-scholar Pico della Mirandola, whose death at age 31 foreshadowed Shelley. From Publishers Weekly. A sketch of the north Italian city of Mantua during the Renaissance by a superb author of travel books. Though small, Mantua played a crucial role in the tortuously complicated Renaissance politics. Focus is on the calculating Gonzaga family whose political astuteness, tangled network of marriage alliances, etc., kept it in power from 1329 to 1629. Simon interweaves condottiere, humanists, artists, and musicians, giving capsule biographies of famous figures. Despite some omissions in coverage, the text is splendid: Simon has an ear attuned to the apposite quote, an especially critical eye for the works of art that made the court of Mantua internationally famous. From Library Journal.

The classic, unforgettable memoir of a young girl's coming of age, "Bronx Primitive" recalls the vitality of an immigrant neighborhood through the unsentimental eyes of a child. With an unerring eye for detail and an iridescent, clear-eyed prose, Kate Simon captures the particular world of her childhood as well as the universal uncertainties and triumphs of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood.