An accessible scholarly account of a man whose life spanned continents, whose charisma was legendary and whose ideas sparked...
Brilliant, charismatic, fatally idealistic and dogmatic—Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was all this and more, according to this fine biography, the latest in the publisher's Jewish Lives series.
Rubenstein (Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, 1996, etc.) locates a key period in Trotsky’s intellectual development in his time spent as a child and adolescent in Odessa, where he lived with relations, acquired cultural awareness and social graces and, most importantly, gained insight into the hardships faced by the working classes. It was in Odessa that he first encountered a systematic, officially sanctioned anti-Semitism that barred him from admittance to select schools. Yet Trotsky’s self-awareness of his Jewish identity was ambivalent throughout his life and always took a backseat to his identity as a communist. Developing into a public voice for change, he was launched on to the international stage after an escape from Siberian exile (where he left his first wife and daughters) to Vienna, where he met Lenin for the first time. During this period, Trotsky traveled extensively throughout Europe, honing ideas and stirring his listeners. Through these experiences, he formulated his notion of a “permanent revolution” necessary to sweep through all of Europe, one of the pillars of his political theory that is, in hindsight, understood to be both deeply flawed and destructive. Afeter 1905, with the exception of a few years, he shuttled between Vienna, London, Finland, Paris, a brief stint in New York and Mexico, where Stalin’s long arm finally reached him. Trotsky proves to be a fascinating subject, a deeply flawed man whose charisma occasionally shines through the many excerpts of his speeches and texts. In the central chapter, “The Revolution of 1917,” Rubenstein not only details the chronological events that led to the Bolshevik party’s consolidation of power, he also presents these in the larger context of Russian and German war strategy. The author explores the battle of personalities between Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, as well as the gamesmanship of succession, with particular attention to Trotsky’s puzzling failure of political acumen in not recognizing or responding to Stalin’s threat to his role as Lenin’s successor.
An accessible scholarly account of a man whose life spanned continents, whose charisma was legendary and whose ideas sparked a revolution and its backlash.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-300-13724-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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