An intriguing eyewitness historical account rendered in a surprisingly pedestrian manner.
A veteran TV news correspondent’s memoir of his first assignment in Russia, which corresponded with Nikita Khrushchev’s unprecedented “thaw.”
A graduate student studying Russian history and language in 1956, Kalb (Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War, 2015, etc.) was plucked by the State Department to do translation work for an international organization in Moscow. In his first memoir, the former anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press and senior adviser at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the author, now in his 80s, switches from writing history to writing about himself to depict this extraordinarily enlightening year—not an easy task. He relies on a diary he kept during this year working as a translator/interpreter, traveling around Russia, and even meeting Khrushchev himself, who made a historic address to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union tearing down the cult worship of the once-untouchable Stalin, who had died in 1953. Raised in the Bronx and in Washington Heights, Kalb attended City College in the footsteps of his older brother, Bernard, who became a New York Times journalist and whose advice proved prophetic: if the author wanted to become a journalist, he should “cultivate an area of expertise…that would catch the eye of an editor or producer.” Learning Russian proved to be the ticket. In Moscow, Kalb was assigned the work of translating and analyzing the Soviet press, which would give clues to what was really going on in the Kremlin. Khrushchev’s speech did change history, and during a time of enormous political uncertainty, Kalb describes scenes of spontaneous youthful demonstrations at the Lenin Library, which would spread that summer to the East Bloc. The author has an amazing story of an important year in Russian history, but the prose doesn’t always match the gravity of the events he recounts.
An intriguing eyewitness historical account rendered in a surprisingly pedestrian manner.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8157-3161-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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