by Brian Moynahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1997
A biography of the bizarre figure—monk, healer, advisor to the empress, and tireless lecher—who did so much to weaken the monarchy before the Russian Revolution. Moynahan, former European editor of the Sunday Times of London (The Russian Century, 1994, etc.) uses mostly secondary sources to arrive at a more persuasive judgment, though the details are scarcely less bizarre. Rasputin was born in Siberia probably around 1870, and from an early age showed unusual powers. These came to the attention of the empress, whose son, the heir apparent, was a hemophiliac.The evidence seems inescapable that on a number of occasions Rasputin was able to relieve Alexis of his pain and help him to recover when his other doctors despaired. The deep bond this created with the empress was based on her perception of his goodness, but in the wake of Russia's terrible defeats during the WW I, it gave rise to the widespread belief that the empress and Rasputin were part of a German conspiracy, and that their relationship was scandalous. It was, but not in any sexual sense. The empress used her influence over her husband (``Your poor, weak-willed little hubby,'' as he called himself) to promote policies and ministers that appealed to Rasputin and herself. Traffic near the front was reduced to chaos after Rasputin had a vision that only food wagons were to be allowed to pass. Ministers remained in office so short a time that they hardly bothered to move in. In all this, Rasputin's motives were more self-protective than venal, but his carousing and licentiousness aroused increasing scandal, and led to his assassination by Prince Yusupov, the heir to the greatest fortune in Russia, early in 1917. Moynahan calls Rasputin a ``curiously modern'' figure, and even if the emphasis falls on the curiousness rather than the modernity, he enables the reader to understand a society that by the end gave the impression, as the French ambassador reported, of being run by lunatics. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-41930-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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