Self-promotion

I am, without doubt, the least motivated writer on earth when it comes to promoting myself and my work. I simply have a horror of “putting myself out there” in the interest of marketing and sales. Neither do I understand anything about “platforms” or the power of social media, including Substack, to generate readership and income. You can tell how old I am because I believe publishers should be responsible for that. But two of my books are still “in print,” inasmuch as they are now sold as eBooks, and the others are easily available for purchase on Amazon and other bookselling websites. I’m showcasing them here because it’s the least I can do (in fact) to honor these works and push myself along in a media world completely changed from the one I knew before.

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Incidentally, I do think American Cassandra should be brought back between covers — actual ones — now that the United States has chosen to embark on the anti-democratic authoritarian path. So I’ll put Dorothy first.

"It was Miss Thompson's great personal tragedy that she never met a man who understood her or knew how to handle her - until now. Peter Kurth, author of the haunting "Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson," proves once again that he is the equal of Stefan Zweig as a biographer of women…. His fairness, his control of his material and his eye for the revealing quotation are such that he makes us empathize with Miss Thompson even when we feel like strangling her." – Florence King

Those who remember Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) at all know she was once married to Sinclair Lewis, and was a journalist of high influence and repute in her own time. As Peter Kurth's sensationally good biography reveals, Thompson was much more: an opinion-maker, international celebrity and very real power behind several thrones - pushing and nagging the great, the near-great and the inept to ensure the survival of those humanitarian ideals for which she tirelessly campaigned and more than once risked her life…. Kurth's vividly detailed and dramatic portrayal of her life fully compensates for the memoirs she planned but never lived to write. He shows her at her best and worst and, without insisting, leaves us persuaded that here was a one-of-a-kind incarnation of energy, honesty and commitment; a woman we must not forget." – USA Today

"Kurth has set out to make "American Cassandra" the definitive life of Miss Thompson, as she was widely known. And what a life it was! Her trials and triumphs larger than ordinary reality, Thompson seemed to live in Technicolor…. As the story moves along … the reader is drawn into her passions and private tribulations. In the end, her death becomes a personal loss." – Chicago Tribune

"If you’re old enough to remember Dorothy Thompson, you know she was an Inescapable Fact…. Her output was like some vast and relentless torrent with a dozen tributaries feeding into the main stream and back out again. Kurth beats a path through all this without fear or pause. He somehow imposes a sense of order on things, despite the odds, and guides us through the tumultuous complexities of the time-the rise of Nazism in Germany; isolationism in America; the Second World War; the establishment of Israel and other issues that Thompson took over as her personal battleground. His daunting task is to show us a mind at work, and he pulls it off." – Washington Post

"An important asset of this big, solid book … is author Kurth's prolific use of Thompson's own words. She left 150 file cases of published and unpublished writings, her ideas, notes and voluminous letters -- chunks of private thoughts and musings on her three husbands and her own sexuality one would have expected her to burn, except that the conflagration, in a more reticent time, might have required a fire company on hand to douse it. Kurth has battled through this paper blizzard and emerged with a clear-as-ice-water picture of a turbulent, complex personality." – Baltimore Sun

Next, Anastasia, who started it all.

"A marvelous, thoroughly engrossing and gripping sifting of the facts…. A spellbinder." -- King Features

"One reads the story through to the bitter end, absolutely mesmerized." – Chicago Sun-Times

"Splendid ... absorbing, it gives the first full picture…. This dispassionate, admirably researched biography will surely persuade most sensible readers that Anna Anderson was indeed the Grand Duchess Anastasia." – D. M. Thomas, PEN Silver Pen winner and author of The White Hotel

And Isadora, who somehow got lost.

"The most famous woman of the first quarter of the 20th century may have been Mary Pickford, but the most influential, and the most notorious, was Isadora Duncan. She was the progenitor and soul of a new art form, modern dance. She was the prototype of the uninhibited young American whose freshness and originality charmed jaded old Europe. And for decades she startled respectable society -- even as she helped transform it -- with her flouting of conventions, both onstage and off. You would have to go back to George Sand or Byron to find a comparably galvanizing figure." – Robert Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

“Peter Kurth has done a heroic job re-creating this charismatic, complicated and deeply tragic figure, born in the heyday of the railroads and dead before the Great Depression. Isadora - evocative, authoritative and sumptuously detailed - will likely become the standard biography.” — Tim Page, Washington Post

"Miss Duncan has learned by heart the tale that the Greeks have left us, and she has followed the Attic dance from statue to bas-relief, from bas-relief to urn, from tragedy to comedy, from history to commentary…. She has strung her beads of learning, cut and polished, on the thread of this wise-child soul of hers, so bubbling with vehement life, and every bead is a prayer, and every prayer a song." -- The New Age (London), July 1908

Then: more Romanovs.

"A page-turner packaged as a coffee-table book." - Entertainment Weekly

"Dazzling...gorgeously illustrated....Mr. Kurth's narrative is amply documented and compellingly written, and offers as fine a portrait of Nicholas and Alexandra's complex characters as any book since Robert K. Massie's biography of nearly three decades ago...Peter Christopher's color photographs of the traditional Romanov sites are as beautiful as any pictures I've seen of Russia. But the modest snapshots, patiently exhumed from archives, taken by members of the imperial family and their entourage, are even more affecting." - New York Times Book Review

"Hauntingly beautiful....The author's lively text touches all the historical bases: wedding, coronation, Bloody Sunday, Rasputin, World War I, revolution, execution, and subsequent exhumation. It is rendered more powerful by the wealth of visual images arranged with loving care." - Los Angeles Times

So. Now you know.