An ambitious yet manageable biography of Stalin, this book sheds new light on its subject for amateur historians and experts...
Khlevniuk (Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, 2008, etc.) delves into the existing body of work surrounding Stalin’s life and career to separate fact from fiction, and he crafts a complete picture of a complex man.
The author opens on the final hours of Joseph Stalin’s life. From there, he bounces between a chronological retelling of the dictator’s rise to power and a detailed examination of the man on his deathbed. It’s an interesting choice that lends an element of retrospection from the very beginning, as readers attempt to find linkages between the mythic Stalin in his later years and the young Georgian student Ioseb Jughashvili. Khlevniuk carefully dismantles the many theories and fictions that surround the life of Stalin, a helpful touch given the long-standing lack of official documentation from the Soviet era. In place of speculation, the author offers readers a portrait of Stalin’s rise to and stranglehold on power, grounded in the leader’s paranoia, opportunism, and willingness to rewrite even his own recent history. Khlevniuk offers deep analysis of the political situation in Russia at various key moments in Stalin’s career, which is useful but at times detailed to the point of distraction. Although the author does not give Stalin the benefit of the doubt when it comes to culpability for the many atrocities that took place during his reign, he doesn’t make Stalin an otherworldly monster. Instead, Khlevniuk’s narrative requires readers to hold in mind the many seemingly contradictory facts of his subject’s life at once. A former seminary student, an ambitious revolutionary, a loving father, and a dictator responsible for the deaths of millions: Stalin is all of these, and Khlevniuk makes room for them all.
An ambitious yet manageable biography of Stalin, this book sheds new light on its subject for amateur historians and experts alike.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-16388-9
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
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