The third entry in Yale's Annals of Communism series consists of documents on the fate of the Romanov dynasty, including official orders, personal letters, diaries, and recollections, interspersed with a commentary by Steinberg (History/Yale Univ.). The documents, found in the Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow (where coauthor Krustalâv is historian-archivist), run from late February 1917, just before the Russian Revolution, up to the execution of the former Tsar Nicholas II with his family and servants in July 1918. It reveals the tsar and his family alternately oblivious to the mood of the times (Alexandra writes to her husband that the riots in St. Petersburg are ``a hooligan movement''); pathetic (in a letter from Nicholas to his sister, ``For me, night is the best part of the dayat least you forget yourself for a while''); and noble (one of the tsar's daughters writes to an officer supposedly organizing their escape that it would be ``ignoble'' to leave without the servants ``after they have followed us voluntarily into exile''). On the vexed question of the responsibility for the murder of the tsar and his family, the documents are inconclusive. Steinberg thinks it likely that Lenin approved the murder but that ``no direct proof has ever surfaced.'' He concludes that the version closest to the evidence is that the Urals Soviet was authorized to execute the tsar and his family without trial if the military situation deteriorated. Most chilling is the recollection of the commissar who murdered them. Writing of the tsar's young hemophiliac son, he noted that ``Aleksei remained seated, petrified, and I finished him off.'' A mixed bag of documents, alternately the mundane record of a largely uneventful captivity and the cruel record of an execution, with first-class analysis from Steinberg.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06557-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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