Beautifully written, incredibly detailed and moving—an important historical document.
The first English translation of the author’s gulag memoir, composed in Russian in 1947 and first published in France in 1949.
Published long before Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973), Margolin’s fierce exposé was largely ignored after the war. In this new version—featuring maps and glossary, a foreword by Timothy Snyder, and a helpfully contextual introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck, translator Hoffman does a brilliant job rendering Margolin’s sardonic flourishes in his presentation of the senseless cruelty of the Soviet gulag system. Born in Pinsk in 1900, then in Russia’s tumultuous Pale of Settlement, Margolin—a Jew who was trying to return to Palestine, where his family had moved by the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939—was ultimately caught up in the terrible nationalistic dilemma of accepting a Soviet passport or returning to Nazi-occupied Poland. Ironically, those who did return perished in the concentration camps. Margolin was arrested and endured five years in the Soviet prison system. He was taken by “coffin” train to the far northwest, on the northern tip of Lake Onega, where Stalin had established a camp to provide the labor to construct the Baltic–White Sea Canal. With the Nazi invasion, the inmates were moved by foot, walking 12 hours per day to the Kargopol camp, 300 miles east. Via the meticulous day-to-day chronicling of the horrendous conditions and labor, spiritless terrain, meager rations, foul conditions, and sadistic behavior by the hardened, predatory criminals with whom he traveled and worked, Margolin sketches the thoroughly dehumanizing system of Sovietization. “I was never enchanted by the Soviet regime,” he writes, “and I never doubted that its theory was unsustainable and its practice full of cruel human fraud.” Attempting to reveal the truth about the camps, Margolin was met by “a stone wall of indifference and treachery.” The final section, “Road to the West,” delineates his arduous, miraculous return to freedom.
Beautifully written, incredibly detailed and moving—an important historical document.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-750214-3
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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