A compelling work; organized, concise, and chilling.
A scholarly biography that goes beyond the gruesome depictions of the Romanovs’ end to examine the more complicated nature of Nicholas II’s character.
Using primary sources and documentation unavailable to earlier scholars, British historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Service (Russian History/Univ. of Oxford; Russia and Its Islamic World: From the Mongol Conquest to the Syrian Military Intervention, 2017, etc.) puts to rest any lingering doubts that the czar’s entire family and retinue were summarily executed in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. The author provides persuasive evidence that Lenin and the leading Bolsheviks approved of the murders, even if there is no direct evidence of his ordering them. Service meticulously examines the Bolsheviks’ dissembling after the fact; they were reluctant to admit to the entire family’s massacre, rather than just Nicholas’, because of the revulsion such an execution of innocents would inspire in Soviet citizens and the world. Nicholas, having ruled as czar for more than 20 years, was forced to abdicate on March 15, 1917, in favor of his brother, Mikhail, who refused the honor in turn. The family took refuge first at their retreat Tsarskoye Selo, outside of Petrograd, and then were moved to a Siberian exile for the next six months while there still was a Provisional Government. The transit to the Bolshevik bastion of Ekaterinburg in May 1918 was the last move. Service sifts through the record to give readers a sense of family life and routine during this fraught time, especially concerning whether Nicholas in any way altered his convictions in his own beliefs: “His actions were those of a ruler who always thought he was right.” He continued to hold fast as “a nationalist extremist, a deluded nostalgist and a virulent anti-Semite.” The author is particularly fascinated by Nicholas’ choice of reading material, from which he learned to empathize with the lives of regular people perhaps for the first time.
A compelling work; organized, concise, and chilling.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-501-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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