The latest issue of the Yale Annals of Communism Series contains significant revelations in the midst of rather turgid and disconnected documents. As Pipes (Russian History/Harvard; Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1994, etc.) notes, much of this material, consisting of messages within the Soviet bureaucracy, tends to be elliptical and refers to events and people without much significance today. Although Pipes explains the material and identifies the protagonists, it is inevitably a little like looking for small nuggets of gold among the pebbles. Nonetheless, the starkest revelations—no longer unexpected, but stark in their brutality- -concern Lenin's repeated acts of cruelty. ``Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,'' he instructs the comrades in charge at Penza, underlining the words ``no fewer than one hundred'' three times. ``It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror,'' he orders the secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Perhaps most surprising is that this treatment is extended also to Jews: ``Treat the Jews and urban inhabitants in the Ukraine with an iron rod,'' he orders. Similarly, he instructs his followers to carry out the confiscation of church valuables ``with the most savage and merciless energy''; orders strikers arrested and hundreds of people deported; gives orders to subvert a treaty that he has just signed; and dismisses his experts as ``shit.'' Other minor revelations include proof that Lenin's mother enrolled herself and her children in the nobility of Simbirsk, so that Lenin, to the embarrassment of the Soviet authorities, was actually a hereditary noble; that in his personal relations with his subordinates he could be highly solicitous (insisting that Stalin take three-day weekends); that he had a low opinion of Trotsky's military abilities (``nothing but bad nerves,'' he sniffs after reading one of Trotsky's telegrams); and that he wrote even to his mistress, Inessa Armand, as if he were reporting to the Central Committee. Not engrossing, but highly enlightening.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06919-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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