The Great Helmsman fully fleshed, still complicated and ever provocative.
A comprehensive, authoritative new study that challenges the received wisdom regarding Mao’s relationship with Stalin and the Soviet Union.
With rare access to the newly consolidated Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Pantsov (History/Capital Univ.; The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919-1927, 2000) and Levine construct an “up-to-date” take on the Chinese Communist Party and Mao’s rise in it as being essentially dictated by Stalin and financially supported by the Soviet Union through the 1950s. Stalin manipulated Mao to his own ends; only after Stalin’s death and Mao’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with Khrushchev did the Chinese pull away from the Soviet Union as part of an “emancipation of consciousness.” The authors’ detail is minute and the characters proliferate mind-bendingly, especially in the careful reconstruction of Mao’s rise from rube and community organizer to national leader. Pantsov and Levine depict Mao with all his conflicting facets, from the early bookworm and idealist who initially scorned the “stupidity” of the masses, to becoming the party’s self-made prophet on the agrarian question, espousing the proletarian confiscation of land from the landlords. He was a man of enormous energy and capacity for love who was nonetheless hardened by the intraparty struggle against Chiang Kai-shek; he was also a utopian socialist who embarked on the modernization scheme of the Great Leap Forward in 1957 after a stimulating trip to Moscow. The great famine that ensued did not dampen Mao’s enthusiasm for revolutionary incentives, as played out tragically in the Red Guards’ devastation, and his “irrepressible lust for violence” has been largely forgiven by history because he consolidated China’s “national liberation.”
The Great Helmsman fully fleshed, still complicated and ever provocative.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5447-9
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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