Given the importance of its subject, relatively unexplored, and the talents of its author (The Prosecutor, 1991), this must be judged a major disappointment. Long before he rose to power in the Soviet Union, Stalin had written a much-quoted essay on ``the national question'' in which he argued that the Jews were not a true nation; thus, according to Stalin, they had no right to self-determination. However, as Vaksberg makes abundantly clear, the Soviet leader would happily exploit those who did feel that the Jews were a nation—and felt threatened by it—when it suited his purposes. Vaksberg traces the rise and fall of numerous Jews within Stalin's inner circle, showing how their presence allowed him to whitewash the anti-Semitism of his policies. Ironically, the Hitler-Stalin pact delayed the start of open hostilities against the Jews in the Soviet Union by taking the ``Jewish question'' off the national agenda temporarily. During the war, Stalin needed the prominent members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), whose appeals to Jews in America produced aid for the Soviet war effort; but it was precisely those Jews in the JAC who would be targeted as ``Zionist conspirators'' after the war. In fact, Vaksberg asserts, the infamous ``Doctors Plot'' of 1952 was supposed to inaugurate a wholesale deportation and murder of Soviet Jews. Fortunately, Stalin's death on the eve of the trials ended that threat. It did not, Vaksberg notes in the book's final chapter, end the political manipulation of anti-Semitism by Stalin's successors. Vaksberg writes with a corrosive sarcasm that becomes wearing with repetition, and the book lacks the sort of documentation and scholarly apparatus that would make it more valuable to historians. He refers often, for instance, to Stalin's secret thoughts while also noting that the dictator rarely committed anything to paper. One hopes that a more comprehensive and comprehensible retelling of this story will become available soon.
Pub Date: April 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42207-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
“Ideology is fairy tales for adults.” Thus writes economist and conservative maven Sowell in a best-of volume shot through with…ideology.
Though he resists easy categorization, the author has been associated with hard-libertarian organizations and think tanks such as the Hoover Institution for most of his long working life. Here he picks from his numerous writings, which have the consistency of an ideologue—e.g., affirmative action is bad, period. It’s up to parents, not society or the schools, to be sure that children are educated. Ethnic studies and the “mania for ‘diversity’ ” produce delusions. Colleges teach impressionable Americans to “despise American society.” Minimum-wage laws are a drag on the economy. And so on. Sowell is generally fair-minded, reasonable and logical, but his readers will likely already be converts to his cause, for which reason he does not need to examine all the angles of a problem. (If it is true that most gun violence is committed in households where domestic abuse has taken place, then why not take away the abusers’ guns as part of the legal sentencing?) Often his arguments are very smart, as when he examines the career of Booker T. Washington, who was adept in using white people’s money to advance his causes while harboring no illusions that his benefactors were saints. Sometimes, though, Sowell’s sentiments emerge as pabulum, as when he writes, in would-be apothegms: “Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one”; “I can understand why some people like to drive slowly. What I cannot understand is why they get in the fast lane to do it.” The answer to the second question, following Sowell, might go thus: because they’re liberals and the state tells them to do it, just to get in the way of hard-working real Americans. A solid, representative collection by a writer and thinker whom one either agrees with or not—and there’s not much middle ground on which to stand.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-02250-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
