Dictators have never looked so educated.
A singular look at how dictators have gained control through literature.
When asked to look back on history, we go first to significant historical events. We examine world wars, local battles, social injustices, and the dictators that have served as resistant and challenging road blocks in the peaceful evolution of society. In his latest book, Texas-based journalist Kalder (Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia, 2009, etc.), who lived in Moscow for 10 years, explores a handful of dictators that have helped shape our conception of 20th-century history by way of the works of literature they produced. “I was struck by the fact that many dictators begin their careers as writers,” writes the author, “which probably goes a long way toward explaining their megalomaniac conviction in the awesome significance of their own thoughts.” Indeed, each of Kalder’s subjects displayed a true passion for irreverent, revolutionary literature. The author begins with Lenin, who “resisted the impulse to deliver a full-throated demand for revolution,” though “immediately after the revolution, he moved to establish part control over the written word.” Stalin was “deeply provincial, describing revolutions and intellectual battles taking place far away, in more interesting places.” Mussolini misidentified “his true vocation as dictator instead of writer.” Hitler “desired to seduce his readers, to present himself as a child of destiny, the logical choice for the national savior” during a time of unrest. Mao defended “the primacy of evidence, research and investigation” and expressed “a desire to shut down everybody who hasn’t done the work.” Following a chapter on each dictator, Kalder delivers a series of focused essays on specific issues such as religion, geopolitics, ecology, technology, and the role literature played in informing the policies written in response (he touches on Castro, Kim Jong Il, Putin, and Hussein). The author renders his highly compelling narrative in a cheeky yet erudite tone that will keep readers smirking despite the monstrousness of the book’s protagonists.
Dictators have never looked so educated.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-342-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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