An astute, absorbing account.
Potent memoir demonstrates the dangers of collecting and dispersing news from behind the Iron Curtain. The book is dedicated to slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya and “the other Russian and Soviet journalists who died under mysterious circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Daniloff (Journalism/Northeastern Univ.; Two Lives, One Russia, 1988, etc.) began his career as a copy boy for the Washington Post in 1956. Following a brief trip to Moscow in 1959 and stints working in London, Paris and Geneva, the author followed his father’s Russian bloodline and headed back to the country to work as a junior UPI correspondent in 1961. Early on, his expectations about the Soviet Union were debunked by the bureau chief, Henry Shapiro. With an exacting eye for detail and a flair for storytelling that captures the uneasy mood of the times, Daniloff provides captivating anecdotes about his days in Moscow—and many surprises. For example, he recalls the unusually pleasant living conditions, with chauffeurs and imported foods available at the drop of a hat. He also reveals more familiar details about strict censorship, how many contacts were not to be trusted and how important conversations were often conducted outside, away from potential bugs. The author also offers a unique perspective on many key events of the times—including Kennedy’s assassination (Daniloff’s bureau filed a story about Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in Russia not long before he traveled to Dallas) and the space race—all told in front of a vivid backdrop of fear and paranoia. Recollections of Daniloff’s career outside the Soviet Union, such as his stint as a foreign-affairs correspondent on Capitol Hill in the mid ’70s, prove less interesting, but he doesn’t linger too long on these sections. The book reaches a natural conclusion with a reprinted interview from U.S. News & World Report, in which Daniloff muses on how life has changed in the Soviet Union during the 20-year period since he first traveled there, and a chapter that details the chase for information during the Chernobyl disaster.
An astute, absorbing account.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1793-6
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
