With the publication of this book, the debate about whether the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was a genuinely home-grown movement or a tool of the Soviet Union has been finally answered. Based on the archives of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, Klehr and Haynes (coauthors of The Secret World of American Communism, not reviewed) and Anderson (a Russian archivist) make it clear that, throughout the period from its founding in 1919 until the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, the CPUSA was heavily funded by the Soviet Union, which selected and paid its leaders, and dictated its strategy. The volume doesn't purport to be a comprehensive history of the party but concentrates on the relationship with Moscow. It is clear that that subordination damaged the ability of the party to make the alliances and adjustments that would have increased its already considerable influence in the labor movement, where by the end of WW II Communists led or helped lead 18 CIO affiliates. While large numbers of individual members became disillusioned and resigned, the party obediently followed every twist in Soviet strategy, from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to its repudiation when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Most shameful of all, the authors note, there is not a single document in which an official of the CPUSA tried to save anyone from Stalin's purges. Indeed, there were occasions in which they leveled accusations that sent Americans to the Gulag. This belief in Soviet perfection ``gave American Communists strength,'' convincing them that it was possible to create an American utopia; the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin's crimes lost the party more than three-quarters of its membership. This is one of those seminal books that do not merely contribute to a debate, but effectively end it.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07150-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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