An intense, incredible story of Russian fortitude and misery.
A history of the Nazis’ death grip on Leningrad artist Dmitri Shostakovich and others.
Before the Germans encircled the city and cut it off from the “mainland” in September 1941, Leningrad had already endured Stalin’s horrific reign of terror and repression during the 1930s. British journalist Moynahan (The French Century: An Illustrated History of Modern France, 2012, etc.) approaches this work with great energy and a solid historical background, sifting through the victims of the NKVD’s brutality with such care and detail that the narrative is sometimes difficult to digest. As one of the city’s most illustrious residents, pianist and composer Shostakovich (1906-1975) had enjoyed tremendous success from his early 20s writing ballets, operas, films and symphonies until 1936, when his work ran afoul of Stalin and was officially denounced in the Leningrad paper as “bourgeois” and “formalist”—i.e., Western-influenced, modernist and lacking the appropriate social realism. Henceforth, the composer was on tenterhooks, as so many fellow artists around him were denounced, imprisoned, tortured and shot. Yet Shostakovich’s work was world-famous, and Stalin recognized his propaganda appeal. With the Nazi tentacles encircling Leningrad, the composer began his Seventh Symphony in patriotic response: “I wanted to create the image of our embattled country, to engrave it in music.” Before he could finish it, however, he was ordered to leave Leningrad with his wife and children; they were airlifted to Moscow and then Kuibyshev, where they enjoyed a comfortable stay for the duration of the war, while his compatriots were starved and weakened by disease and freezing cold. The Seventh debuted to great fanfare in Moscow, London and America, and it eventually found its way back to Leningrad, orchestrated by 100-plus musicians fainting from hunger but resolute for its first hometown performance.
An intense, incredible story of Russian fortitude and misery.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2316-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
