“Everyday Stalinism” may seem like an oxymoron, but life did go on even in those terrible circumstances, and it is the virtue of this book that it attempts to understand what life was like for ordinary people. Since this is an account of urban life, the killing of millions of peasants, dealt with by Fitzpatrick (Modern Russian History/Univ. of Chicago) in her earlier Stalin’s Peasants (1994), takes place offstage here, but it profoundly affected the —30s, not just in the massive social dislocation, the overcrowding in communal apartments, and a rationing system close to collapse, but in the pervasive fear. Criminal penalties could be imposed on a worker 20 minutes late for work. The bureaucracy accumulated enormous power over people’s lives. In one factory, after a hairdresser had been appointed, it became a criminal offense to shave oneself. It became too dangerous to participate in policy debates. And then, over and above the millions claimed by the Purges, there was the simultaneous round-up and execution of thousands of ’socially dangerous elements,— church people, —counter-revolutionaries,— and habitual criminals. Fitzpatrick tells us that the target figure for executions was 70,000 and for dispatch to the Gulag 200,000. Fitzpatrick does show that there were some who were either favored by the process or unaffected by it, or who thought that these were necessary sacrifices on the way to a radiant future. The scale of the sacrifice was concealed from the people by a state that was increasingly secretive and unwilling to allow knowledge of what it was doing to be disseminated. There are some curious judgments: that Stalin —perhaps covertly encouraged— the cult of personality, or that the idea of remaking the human being ’seems to have had some genuinely inspirational impact— in the Gulag. But Fitzpatrick makes subtle use of the press and of police reports tzao assist in giving us one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of what it meant to live in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-505000-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
A lawyer argues that Americans do not know enough about how death sentences are carried out and that the way to learn about them is to let TV cameras into the execution chamber. As the title indicates, executions usually take place between midnight and sunrise, before a small number of witnesses. This, says Bessler, who has assisted in the pro bono representation of four death-row inmates, largely accounts for declining interest in this society's most solemn punishment. It allows us to keep out of sight and out of mind the more gruesome aspects of execution, especially when the process goes awry. Also, more insidiously, it allows us—from politicians who endorse the death penalty as a way of seeming tough on crime to jurors who sentence a criminal to death—to evade a sense of responsibility for taking another's life. To allow better- informed public debate on the issue, he argues, we should be able to see executions on television, which delivers ``unfiltered images'' and ``objectively record[s]'' what is before the cameras—claims that are astonishingly naive. The history of public executions, private executions, and related legislation and court cases (given, at some points, in extraneous detail) suggests that there is no way of reliably predicting our response to such telecasts. Some viewers are likely to be horrified, some outraged, and some entertained. Moreover, neither proponents nor opponents of the death penalty can be entirely certain such exposure will swell their ranks. Regardless, says Bessler, let people see what goes on. Bessler is convincing when he argues that we need more light on the subject of the death penalty, but he fails to make a case that the flickering TV screen will cast more light than heat. (illustrations, not seen) (For another study of the death penalty, see Mark Costanzo, Just Revenge: Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty, p. 1428.)
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1997
ISBN: 1-55553-322-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A physician's curiosity leads him to a subject oddly underexplored in its own right: the face. British neurophysiologist Cole pursues the link between our faces and our inner selves in a science-minded inquiry that is very much a natural history rather than a cultural one. But it's not strictly scientific, either: Cole's topic lies among questions just out of the confident grasp of science—the nature and relationship of mind and body, of thoughts and feelings, the definition of consciousness itself. Given that, Cole assembles persuasive speculations from his journalistic research among people who either can't perceive facial expressions or can't make them as a result of blindness, autism, disfigurement, or face-impairing Mîbius syndrome, Bell's palsy, and Parkinson's disease. Despite the variety of conditions described in these uniformly heartfelt interviews, his conclusions from them are largely similar: that facial expression exists somewhere pivotal between the mental and the physical, that the face, beyond simply expressing interior states, actually affects the emotional life through its importance in relating to others. The chapters on autistic subjects—for whom the disctinctions between self and others, body and mind and emotion, are strangely ruptured—are powerfully suggestive of the complexity of the face's meaning; but relying heavily, in brief encounters, on the ad hoc personal vocabulary used by subjects to try to explain their experiences, this study remains little more than suggestive. But that's only to say that Cole has initiated an ambitious synthesis, putting the face at the center of various disciplines that touch on it—neurological, psychiatric, evolutionary (he surmises that faces function emotionally in primates' individual relationships as well as humans') that may be taken up by such specialists in response to his impressions. A genial peek—in the mirror, as it were—at the mystery of the self. (13 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-262-03246-5
Page Count: 244
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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