Scholarly and poignant account of conditions in Russia's collective farms in the 30's. In an attempt to obtain ever higher grain quotas and stamp out private enterprise, Stalin forced millions of peasants into the collective farm (kolkhoz) system—with catastrophic effects in both human and economic terms. Drawing on recently opened Soviet archives, including reports of the secret police, and her own vast reading of the newspapers of rural Russia, Fitzpatrick pieces together the picture of how collectivization worked in the lives of local communities and individuals. We learn the various ways in which people reacted to the closing of the churches and the liquidation of the more prosperous peasant class (the kulaks), how peasants were cajoled into the kolkhoz and the effects of expulsion from it, how the officials behaved, how the roles of women varied, how local handicrafts came to be replaced by factory products, and much more. We meet heroes of Soviet labor (udarniks and stakhaovites) like Sasha Angelina, who promised Stalin she would plough 1,200 hectares with her tractor, and combine operator Maria Demchenko, whose photograph with Stalin in 1936 entitled ``The Flowering Soviet Ukraine'' became one of the notable icons of the period. The author describes the almost religious cult of Stalin and the idealized ``Potemkin Village,'' but she shows that in reality the peasants hated Stalin and considered collectivization a second serfdom: those who could not depart for the cities hoped for deliverance by a counter-revolution or even foreign invasion. Fitzpatrick makes her account vivid with quotations of first-person experiences, but she resists the temptation to oversimplify the issues. A glossary explains Soviet terms and acronyms. Highly detailed—a must for students of Soviet, or social, history.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-506982-X
Page Count: 375
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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