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 mostly unsuccessful attempt to fathom the psyche of a doctor who claimed that voices often directed his bizarre behavior. Ablow, a columnist for the Washington Post and a practicing psychiatrist in Lynn, Mass., examines John Kappler's troubled life and tries to peer into his tortured mind. He opens this account with the day that Kappler, a truly unsympathetic character and a terribly dangerous man, drove his car off a parkway in Boston and aimed it carefully at two people on a pedestrian path. One of them, a psychiatrist friend of the author's, was killed. Ablow then turns to Kappler's childhood, looking for clues and speculating about the causes of his instability, anger, and destructiveness. He traces Kappler's spotty medical career (he was a freelance anesthesiologist, working out of some 50 hospitals in the Los Angeles area) and his frequent nervous breakdowns. Over the years Kappler received more than a dozen different diagnoses from psychiatrists and sporadically took numerous medications, including antipsychotics. Though he seems to have received little real help, it is not clear that he would accept any. Despite his problems and the threat his erratic behavior posed to patients, he continued practicing medicine until 1985, when he was accused of turning off a patient's life support system. Although the charges were later dismissed, Kappler, thoroughly disgraced, finally retired. The last portion of the book focuses on the murder trial in Boston, at which the central issue was whether Kappler was accountable for his actions or not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury found him guilty, but Ablow argues that he should more properly be seen as a victim—both of mental illness and of psychiatry's failure to help him. Ablow speculates and opines freely, but Kappler, who refused to be interviewed, remains a dark mystery.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-900161-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Armstrong issues a sobering call to repoliticize the issue of incest, which has fallen prey to the mental health field, its cadre of ``experts,'' and an antifeminist backlash. In 1978 Armstrong published Kiss Daddy Goodnight, which presented incest as ``the cradle of sexual politics'' where the rights of women and children collide with male entitlement and abuse of power. The attendant media hype turned Armstrong into ``the World's First Walking, Talking Incest Victim''; and since then she has witnessed the telling of incest stories become an end in itself. The personal is no longer political, she says, just public, as people accept fees to tell of their abuse on TV talk shows. She identifies a trajectory in public attitudes toward incest: first, it was ignored; in the mid-1980s the publication of The Courage to Heal (the incest ``Bible'') encouraged a therapeutic, personal approach to ``recovery'' devoid of any social significance; now, Armstrong argues, the issue is dominated by antifeminist backlash and sensational tales of satanic ritual abuse and of men and their families wrongly accused as a result of false- memory syndrome. Virtually ``every aspect of the social response to the issue of incest,'' she writes, ``has implied a policy of appeasement toward men.'' Armstrong documents a decade and a half of evasive responses to the problem of incest during which the number of children being sexually abused continued apace. These responses ranged from viewing incest as a mental illness rather than an abuse of power to abuse prevention ``games'' for children that overlook the fact that the offender is often a parent or trusted adult. An important, incendiary, unapologetic history written in hopes of rekindling the possibility of radical change—nothing less than a redistribution of gender power.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62471-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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