by Paul Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2014
Whether the book can remedy that situation is unknown, as well, but as informed opinion, it’s very satisfying.
Slender character study of “one of the outstanding monsters civilization has yet produced.”
Noted historian and biographer Johnson (Mozart: A Life, 2013, etc.) should not be expected to write anything but a condemnation of the Soviet dictator, and so he has—not that Stalin has many defenders these days and certainly not among the intelligentsia. However, the author finds a few kind things to say: Stalin was an accomplished letter writer and voracious reader whose personal library encompassed 20,000 volumes, and he could be charming when he wished. Even so, Stalin was, of course, not a good man: His wife killed herself, a son drank himself to death, a daughter defected to the West, and countless millions of Soviet citizens and their neighbors died. Stalin would doubtless call those people “problems,” for which, Johnson writes, he had a formula: “These were problem men, and death solves the problem. No men, no problem.” Like all tyrants, Stalin was afraid of his own shadow: Even as fully half a million Soviets were devoted to serving as his guard, toward the end of his life, despising the “Jewish doctors” who surrounded him, he ate little but hard-boiled eggs with the thought that they were one of the few foods that could not be poisoned. He also succeeded in creating “a society in which everyone was afraid,” from the lowliest street-sweeper to his closest lieutenant. A monster indeed and one with whom history has yet to fully reckon, a task that this too-brief book can only begin to address. Johnson writes that his impetus for writing this short study of Stalin is that “among the young, he is insufficiently known.”
Whether the book can remedy that situation is unknown, as well, but as informed opinion, it’s very satisfying.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: B00E3E4XNO
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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