A sober, comprehensive volume that variously provokes unease or reassurance, but ought to have something for all interested...
A thoughtful anthology, presenting a plurality of views and explorations of the tumultuous first decade of democratic Russia.
EastWest Institute Vice President Isham (Remaking Russia, not reviewed) has assembled a muscular array of 26 contributors, ranging from academics to entrepreneurs, each distinctly Russian in outlook. Former US ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock sets a high tone in his introduction, revisiting the heady days of Gorbachev’s perestroika and the rapid decline of Russia in Western eyes, noting that many fail to grasp the “enormous damage” wrought by Communism. Other contributions are grouped according to broad categories, reflecting the essayists’ expertise on topics concerning the Russian state, economic transformations, developments towards rule of law and civil society, cultural preservation, and educational safeguards. These essays contain much that runs counter to accepted notions of Russian malaise and entropy, as in government economist Natal’ia Fonareva’s defense of anti-monopoly efforts (“Protecting Fair Competition”). Some present less official, even oppositional perspectives, such as a personal narrative by former Miners’ Union president Alexsandr Sergeev on the travails of labor organizing in Russia’s “transitional economy.” Others capture the voices of social groups that were marginalized under Communism and assess their progress since 1991 (specifically the young, women, the Russian Orthodox Church, the urban homeless, and independent journalists). Similar recent anthologies have attempted to wrestle with the post-Communist chimera, but they usually were confined to economic or political analysis. While Isham includes much of both, he provides some refreshingly unorthodox commentary, as when New Literary Review editor Irina Prokhorova tells “A Sad Tale About a Happy Fate,” reflecting on the travails of operating a small press in the new land of Pushkin. In a similarly rueful vein, Vadim Radaev (Higher School of Economics) concludes “It’s Not Easy Being a Scholar in Modern Russia,” sketching a period of institutional decline and pursuit of sustenance from Western foundations.
A sober, comprehensive volume that variously provokes unease or reassurance, but ought to have something for all interested readers.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-8133-3866-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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