An informative but confused look at the perpetuation in power of Russia's previous rulers, by one of the last dissidents to be jailed by the Gorbachev regime. Timofeyev is clearly right in certain important respects. As he notes, a high proportion of the politicians and bureaucrats still in power in the former Soviet Union are Communists or former Communists. Clearly, too, the degree of corruption required to work within the Soviet system during its final days was immense. Timofeyev argues, in fact, that ``the entire Soviet economy, from top to bottom, is permeated by black market relationships,'' and that ``the Communists suffered defeat primarily because they could not destroy the market.'' He contends, plausibly, that the ruling apparat itself became a market commodity, with numerous jobs having a more or less defined market value. As the Party, committed heavily in so many parts of the world, could no longer afford to unleash a reign of terror, it was compelled to resort to corruption to make its system work. Timofeyev goes too far, however, not only in making unprovable assertions (``It is known that half of all profits made in the criminal sphere are spent in bribing officials'') but in arguing that a criminal mafia is, in effect, the secret ruler of Russia. He attempts to strengthen this argument with ``witness testimony''—interviews he has conducted with figures such as Eduard Shevardnadze, Moscow mayor Gavrill Popov, retired KGB general Oleg Kalugin, and former Washington Post correspondent David Remnick. But little of this testimony supports Timofeyev's mafia-rule thesis: Popov says that he hasn't noticed any significant political activity among the criminal mafia itself, and Remnick points out that what we in the West understand as the mafia is completely different from the Russian variety. Not wholly persuasive, then—though Timofeyev's not alone in seeing Russia's criminal classes in the ascendant: This is also the premise, for instance, of Martin Cruz Smith's most recent novel, Red Square (p. 1085).
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58639-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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