A revealing biography of perhaps the most tragic figure of the Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky was once portrayed as the pivotal figure of the revolution, as idealistic as Lenin but far less ruthless than Stalin. If he had gained power, rather than Stalin, the theory goes, the revolution might have turned out differently. Volkogonov's biography Lenin: Life and Legacy (1994, not reviewed) destroyed any illusions about the man and Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (1991) reinforced the dictator's negative image. Now we have the last volume in a collective biography of the leadership of the Russian Revolution. And perhaps no one was better prepared to write it than Volkogonov, who rose to the post of deputy chief of political indoctrination in the Soviet army despite the fact that his father had been a victim of one of Stalin's purges. Before his death last month, Volkogonov had unprecedented access to army, party, and NKVD archives, and even to Stalin's personal library. Here he does a masterful job of conveying the ``madness'' of revolution and Trotsky's intoxication with the myth of ``permanent revolution.'' Although Trotsky has always been held up as more humane than Stalin, Volkogonov unflinchingly reveals his brutality and fanaticism. Defenders of the Bolshevik Revolution once argued that Stalin betrayed its principles, but it now appears that Lenin set the pattern for the abuses and that Trotsky would have been constrained by the historical forces unleashed by revolution. In the end, Trotsky, unable to control these forces, which he had helped set in motion, or to accept the inadequacies of his own ideas, became an isolated, harassed figure, more memorable for the fervor of his beliefs than for their value. An authoritative and definitive biography of a figure instrumental in shaping the 20th century. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82293-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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