Boeck displays his wide range of knowledge of the Soviet Union and delivers an insightful, gripping, squirm-inducing...
Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984), winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in literature and a favorite of Joseph Stalin.
In his second book, Boeck (Russian and Soviet History/DePaul Univ.; Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great, 2009) works hard—and mostly successfully—“to reconcile the bold, uncompromising, and sympathetic Sholokhov…with the vindictive, mean-spirited man described in many accounts of late Soviet history.” Sholokhov was an obscure 21-year-old short story writer when he wrote his classic novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. Appearing serially in literary magazines from 1926 to 1940, the narrative tells the story of a Cossack family whose hero fights in World War I and the Russian Revolution. The first two volumes were bestsellers, but in 1930, his editor regarded further installments as insufficiently pro-revolutionary. Sholokhov refused to make changes but agreed to visit Maxim Gorky, the nation’s literary idol, to discuss the matter. To his amazement, the meeting included Stalin. Grilled on the controversy, Sholokhov satisfied Stalin, who considered himself a patron of the arts. He not only approved publication, but gave the author his personal secretary’s phone number. Almost immediately, Sholokhov witnessed Stalin’s murderous collectivization campaign and famine followed by the Terror, which devoured many colleagues. He appealed to Stalin, who freed several friends and sent food to his home district. Like naïve patriots throughout history, Sholokhov considered his ruler blameless but betrayed by evil underlings, and he remained a protégé, producing fawning speeches and writing that he struggled to repress after Stalin’s death. By the 1960s, he enjoyed international celebrity but wrote little of consequence, and his privileged status and literary conservatism did not endear him to the younger generation.
Boeck displays his wide range of knowledge of the Soviet Union and delivers an insightful, gripping, squirm-inducing portrait of a great author who loyally served his government—perhaps too loyally.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68177-874-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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