The author’s wit and biting analysis render this a most readable study.
What first appears to be a narrowly academic profile of two rival scholars amplifies into a trenchant, engaging study of the postwar split between the New Left and Western liberalism.
Historian Caute (Politics and the Novel During the Cold War, 2009, etc.) was privy to Isaiah Berlin’s attempts to blackball Isaac Deutscher from gaining an academic post in 1963, when the author and Berlin were both fellows at All Souls College, Oxford. In this sharply argued work, the author develops and clarifies their feud in light of Cold War attitudes. Both brilliant minds who hailed from Eastern European Jewish families and eventually took refuge in England from totalitarian violence, the two writers, journalists and historians made their way in British academia and publishing with remarkable success, though with vastly different ideological takes regarding the Soviet Union. As the Cold War ramped up, both became enormously in demand to delineate the struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. For Berlin, the notion of individual liberty and responsibility dispelled any illusions about Soviet reality and Marxist determinism, while Deutscher, whose formative years were spent as a member of the Polish Communist Party, was a well-connected Marxist whose deeply researched biographies of Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin were considered as helpful explanations to the West as well as apologies. Recognized as an international relations expert, Deutscher hoped to move from journalism to academia but was thwarted by Berlin, serving on the advisory board, who denounced his rival in confidential letters as being “morally intolerable.” Caute astutely probes the contentious issues, including concepts of history, Zionism and life for dissident writers in the Soviet Union.
The author’s wit and biting analysis render this a most readable study.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-19209-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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