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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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