A compelling biography of one of the great historical enigmas of the last century. (24 pages of b&w photos and...
A fascinating history of the Russian visionary Rasputin, whose strange influence over the imperial family during the twilight of the Romanov dynasty reads like something out of a gothic novel.
Radzinsky is an accomplished playwright and biographer (The Last Tsar, 1992; Stalin,1996). Here he follows up on his earlier portrait of Nicholas II and the various figures, wholesome and malign, who orbited around him during the last years of his reign. Rasputin was a faith healer, spiritualist, drunk, and lecher. A Siberian peasant whose origins were as murky as his aims, Rasputin did not leave a terribly clear account of himself behind. Most of the primary-source texts describing him were written either by his enemies or by the secret police, and Rosengrant’s fluid translation allows us to follow the highly byzantine paper trail Rasputin bequeathed to his future biographers. Radzinsky places his young subject deep in the Siberian pastimes of alcohol and lawlessness. The climax of these early years of debauchery and violence, according to Rasputin’s own account, was a strange and overwhelming epiphany that literally hit him in the face, inducing in him a cleansing repentance from the blood and pain of his youth. He left a young family for years of penitential wandering across the length and breadth of “Holy Russia,” and eventually joined a strange flagellant cult of `Christ Believers` who mixed Orthodoxy with paganism. Sweaty, ecstatic dancing and singing led to `promiscuous sexual relations among the sect membership . . . where the Holy Spirit descended upon them . . . and the sect would try to conceive . . . new Christs and Mothers of God.` Soon Rasputin had developed a cult of his own, one that eventually brought him to the attention of the imperial court. Radzinsky reveals the secret behind Rasputin's psycho-spiritual hold on the tsarina and many other powerful women and men, and fleshes out the wide picture of Rasputin's many friends and foes, including the wealthy transvestite who murders him.
A compelling biography of one of the great historical enigmas of the last century. (24 pages of b&w photos and illustration)Pub Date: May 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-48909-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
A whole-earth catalogue of martial cunning that suggests Victorian novelist Francis E. Smedley was at least half right when he decreed that ``all's fair in love and war.'' In a breezy survey more notable for breadth than depth, Dunnigan and Nofi (Shooting Blanks, 1991) offer a series of short, self-contained takes that show why guile ranks among the most effective weapons in any arsenal. Accounts range from how the Israelites employed false retreats in their conquest of Canaan through the ways in which the Allies concealed their capacity to decode Axis radio traffic. Before getting down to ammunition cases, however, the authors provide introductory perspectives on such tricks of the military trade as ambuscades, camouflage, concealment, disinformation, and feints. Having set the scene, they deliver a roughly chronological guide that rambles from the wily warriors of ancient times (Joshua, Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, et al.) through the havoc indigenous insurgents or outlaws have wreaked on UN peacekeepers in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. Along their episodic way, Dunnigan and Nofi comment knowledgeably on the practice of deception during the Crusades, several revolutions (including the American), early US campaigns against native American tribes, two global conflicts, and a host of other hostilities, including what the authors call ``the other Gulf War,'' which pitted Iran against Iraq for most of the 1980s. They also cover the sly likes of Cesare Borgia, George Washington, Napoleon, Rommel, two generations of Israeli commanders, and the spymasters who waged most of the Cold War's major battles. Nor do they scant the contributions of technology (advanced or otherwise) to essentially bloodless triumphs in belligerencies down through the ages. Savvy, often sardonic briefings on the consequential role of subterfuge in an enterprise in which, as the old saw has it, truth is the first casualty. (maps, charts, tables)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-12236-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-born German Jew's immensely appealing reminiscences of his seven-year odyssey as a guest and then an officer of the British Crown. When the UK declared war on Hitler's Third Reich in 1939, 19- year-old Chelton grad Lynton (nÇ Max Otto Ludwig Loewenstein in Stuttgart) was leading a sheltered, even sybaritic, existence as a second-year student at Cambridge. In his first book, he recounts how, thanks to the vagaries of Home Office policy, he was interned as an enemy alien. Shipped to a camp in a remote corner of Canada, Lynton was later allowed to work his way back to Great Britain as a deck hand on a merchant vessel. He joined the Pioneer Corps, a paramilitary outfit employed on construction and cleanup projects, and after a couple of years building public loos all over southwestern England was permitted to join the army, where he anglicized his name at the unofficial behest of the government and earned a commission. Posted to a tank regiment, Lynton and his comrades, most veterans of North Africa, were in the thick of the post-D-day fighting that liberated Europe. During the subsequent occupation, the author's fluent German landed him in the Intelligence Corps' Political Section, from which he helped restore Germany's democratic institutions with the aid of anti-Nazis like Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Schmidt. He was demobilized in 1947 with the rank of major. The irreverently recounted details of his youthful journey will prove rewarding for most readers—in recalling the proprietress of a popular nightspot in bombed-out London, for example, Lynton notes, ``She was a rabid Welsh nationalist and Francophile, a combination rarely met outside a production of Henry V.'' The engaging recollections of a keen observer who looks back in ironic bemusement at horrific times he survived in remarkably good humor.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87951-577-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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