Essential to understanding one of the 20th century’s premier monsters and the nation he wrought.
Joe Stalin, gang-banger.
In this superb prequel to his Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004, etc.), novelist, historian and UK television personality Montefiore observes that there have been many character studies of Adolf Hitler, but fewer on his semblable. Stalin, as Montefiore shows, took pains to hide the facts of his youth—which in some ways lasted until he was nearly 40, when the Revolution broke out—and to make it difficult for him to be seen as anything but a great man. As Montefiore’s groundbreaking work shows, there was much to hide. Though Stalin was a man of keen intellect and quite bookish, he was also a thug who styled himself a descendant of a “Caucasian bandit-hero called Koba,” whence his familiar nickname. He wore a thick beard and long hair, committed crimes ranging from petty theft to extortion to bank robbery and inducted fellow young people into the pleasures of reading Emile Zola’s Germinal. His fondness for brigand antics made his more moderate comrades in the underground think of him as “a muddled young comrade,” but he acquired new discipline in the tsar’s prisons, where, even if he “preferred rogues to revolutionaries,” he also made himself into an indispensable authority on Marxism, ready to cite chapter and verse in any discussion. A gift from a fellow revolutionary of Machiavelli’s Prince set him on a different course, and soon he would be in a position to revise his past to make it seem as if he had been at Lenin’s side the whole time. “At heart, he was too intelligent not to appreciate that many of the paeans to his youth were ridiculous,” writes Montefiore, who has scoured the archives to make this book. Nonetheless, Stalin insisted on those paeans all the same.
Essential to understanding one of the 20th century’s premier monsters and the nation he wrought.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4465-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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