by Dmitri Volkogonov ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 1996
A revealing biography of perhaps the most tragic figure of the Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky was once portrayed as the pivotal figure of the revolution, as idealistic as Lenin but far less ruthless than Stalin. If he had gained power, rather than Stalin, the theory goes, the revolution might have turned out differently. Volkogonov's biography Lenin: Life and Legacy (1994, not reviewed) destroyed any illusions about the man and Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (1991) reinforced the dictator's negative image. Now we have the last volume in a collective biography of the leadership of the Russian Revolution. And perhaps no one was better prepared to write it than Volkogonov, who rose to the post of deputy chief of political indoctrination in the Soviet army despite the fact that his father had been a victim of one of Stalin's purges. Before his death last month, Volkogonov had unprecedented access to army, party, and NKVD archives, and even to Stalin's personal library. Here he does a masterful job of conveying the ``madness'' of revolution and Trotsky's intoxication with the myth of ``permanent revolution.'' Although Trotsky has always been held up as more humane than Stalin, Volkogonov unflinchingly reveals his brutality and fanaticism. Defenders of the Bolshevik Revolution once argued that Stalin betrayed its principles, but it now appears that Lenin set the pattern for the abuses and that Trotsky would have been constrained by the historical forces unleashed by revolution. In the end, Trotsky, unable to control these forces, which he had helped set in motion, or to accept the inadequacies of his own ideas, became an isolated, harassed figure, more memorable for the fervor of his beliefs than for their value. An authoritative and definitive biography of a figure instrumental in shaping the 20th century. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82293-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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