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
Asante is a talented writer, but his memoir is undernourished.
A young black man’s self-destructive arc, cut short by a passion for writing.
Asante’s (It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop, 2008, etc.) memoir, based on his teenage years in inner-city Philadelphia, undoubtedly reflects the experiences of many African-American youngsters today in such cities. By age 14, the author was an inquisitive, insecure teen facing the hazards that led his beleaguered mother, a teacher, to warn him, “[t]hey are out there looking for young black boys to put in the system.” This was first driven home to Asante when his brother received a long prison sentence for statutory rape; later, his father, a proud, unyielding scholar of Afrocentrism, abruptly left under financial strain, and his mother was hospitalized after increasing emotional instability. Despite their strong influences, Asante seemed headed for jail or death on the streets. This is not unexplored territory, but the book’s strength lies in Asante’s vibrant, specific observations and, at times, the percussive prose that captures them. The author’s fluid, filmic images of black urban life feel unique and disturbing: “Fiends, as thin as crack pipes, dance—the dancing dead….Everybody’s eyes curry yellow or smog gray, dead as sunken ships.” Unfortunately, this is balanced by a familiar stance of adolescent hip-hop braggadocio (with some of that genre’s misogyny) and by narrative melodrama of gangs and drug dealing that is neatly resolved in the final chapters, when an alternative school experience finally broke through Asante’s ennui and the murderous dealers to whom he owed thousands were conveniently arrested. The author constantly breaks up the storytelling with unnecessary spacing, lyrics from (mostly) 1990s rap, excerpts from his mother’s journal, letters from his imprisoned brother, and quotations from the scholars he encountered on his intellectual walkabout in his late adolescence. Still, young readers may benefit from Asante’s message: that an embrace of books and culture can help one slough off the genuinely dangerous pathologies of urban life.
Asante is a talented writer, but his memoir is undernourished.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9341-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.
The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955
ISBN: 0807064319
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
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