An unforgettable memoir of a journalist who survived two incarcerations in the Gulag, filled with his memories of the victims, the executioners, and those who connived with Stalin's genocidal plans. Razgon, born in 1908, a writer and editor connected by marriage to top Stalinist officials, was a Communist who was caught up in the purges of the late 1930s and was finally released only after the Khrushchev reforms of the 1950s. He records the life of the elite both before the purges—he is the last person alive to have attended the Congress of the Communist Party in 1934—and what happened to them afterwards. Most memorable are his vivid portraits of those with whom he came into contact: Roshchakovsky, an aristocratic ÇmigrÇ who had returned to serve the Soviet navy and ``would eat the prison soup with the wooden spoons so beautifully that it was impossible to tear your eyes away''; Boris and Gleb, ages 16 and 18 respectively, who returned from Czechoslovakia to help the Soviet Union, only to find themselves transported to the Gulag; Zaliva, a bluff and honest camp commandant who killed 1,500 people in the course of a single winter by insisting on following his instructions to the letter; and Colonel Tarasyuk, with the profile of a Roman senator, who calmly gave instructions on one occasion that ensured that everyone in his hospital would be dead within a month. Razgon notes that, according to a Ministry of State Security report in 1956, between 1935 and 1941 alone seven million people were shot—a million a year. During Alexander II's reign, by contrast, just over 60 political prisoners were hanged in Russia. But the author's thoughts ultimately turn not just to the victims or their families, but to the tens of thousands who participated in the process of execution and are now living quiet lives somewhere in Russia. A brilliant memoir, by turns harrowing, inspiring, sardonic, and devastating. (20 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-87501-108-X
Page Count: 302
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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