A Polish aristocrat blessed with a considerable sense of noblesse oblige recalls years of resistance to totalitarian rule.
Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, who died in Rome at the age of 104, in 2002, wrote this rich memoir in 1945 and ’46. She sent parts of it to two English publishers, she writes, who rejected it as “too anti-Russian.” A few years later, she sent it to two more publishers, who rejected it as “too anti-German.” In the context of Cold War politics, the publishers were right. In whatever context, Lanckoronska describes, sometimes with considerable indignation, what life was like in Lvov when the Red Army first invaded it under the partition following the Nazi-Soviet pact; a university professor of art history and specialist in the Renaissance, she clearly considered the newcomers barbarians, easily amused by baby rattles and ignorant of how to use a toilet or shower. By her account, the Soviets were also easily misled, childish as they were, yet not without resources and the ability to induce fear: “I was expecting the NKVD every time the doorbell rang,” she writes. With the arrival of the Nazis, she found a new enemy, and so did they. Captured and sentenced to be executed for working with the resistance, she was spared by odd circumstances: One of her interrogators admitted to her that he had participated in the murder of 25 of her fellow professors, and when she brought the matter to another Nazi officer, her sentence was commuted to imprisonment. At Ravensbrück concentration camp, perhaps improbably, she organized her barracks into a miniature university and taught art history to her fellow inmates—and, summoning up the weight of her nobility, also commanded “a degree of orderliness in collective living to ensure that contact with the Germans was kept to the minimum possible.”
An unusual memoir from an unusual point of view, one that at times recalls Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind; readable and thought-provoking.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81537-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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