Lieven (a political historian at the London School of Economics whose specialty is imperial Russia: Russia's Rulers Before the Revolution, 1989, etc.—not reviewed) reinterprets the life and political significance of Nicholas II in light of the USSR's collapse. Unlike Edvard Radzinsky in his magisterial Last Tsar (1992)- -which depicted Nicholas as doting, charming, and ineffectual—and Marc Ferro in Nicholas II (p. 274)—which portrayed the Russian ruler as a politically naive, pleasure-loving king in the tradition of Louis XVI—Lieven presents Nicholas as an anachronism, a patriarchal leader crippled by tradition, bureaucracy, and an inability to deal with the social and technological changes that challenged his authority. As a political leader, Lieven says, Nicholas failed to deal with the abysmal poverty of the peasants and overreacted to the ``Yellow Peril,'' expending resources in a wasteful and remote war with Japan. Surrounded by a bureaucracy, as well as by a jealous and petty aristocracy, he ran the government as a family business that both isolated him from the contemporary world and caused him to fritter away his time on trivia: This ruler of 150 million had no personal secretary and answered all his own correspondence. Rasputin gained power, Lieven explains, because he represented the faith of the peasants, on which Nicholas relied. By comparing Nicholas with other monarchs in Japan, Germany, and especially Persia (in the figure of the shah, whom Nicholas resembled in many personal ways), Lieven introduces an international context to explain the inevitability of the tsar's destruction in a terrible incongruence of time, temperament, and talent. In the chapter dealing with Nicholas's execution, the author displays a skill at dramatic writing that's equal to his cool and dispassionate political analysis—an analysis that culminates in his discussion of the relevance of Nicholas to Russia's struggle to recover its sense of identity after the collapse of Communism. A rare balance of personal and political insight: timely and persuasive.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10510-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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