An often fascinating—if sometimes aggravating—history that explores how the Soviet Union tried to shape Western cultural opinion in the 1920's and 1930's. Koch (Writing/Columbia; The Bachelors' Bride, 1986, etc.) uses the story of the relatively obscure Communist propaganda master Willi MÅnzenberg as ``an Ariadne's thread through much in twentieth-century politics.'' MÅnzenberg—a German publisher and politician who operated largely in France (where he died mysteriously in 1940)—headed a huge media consortium of newspapers, magazines, and film companies, covertly financed by the USSR, that guided Western fellow travelers and propaganda fronts. Luminaries targeted as agents of influence—many of whom enlisted in the service of anti-Fascism—included those who broke quickly with this apparatus (John Dos Passos, AndrÇ Gide); the more easily hoodwinked (Ernest Hemingway, Romaine Rolland, AndrÇ Malraux); and diehard believers (Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Lincoln Steffens, Bertolt Brecht). MÅnzenberg's phrase for his network- -``Innocents' Clubs''—only begins to hint at the cynicism of the Soviet regime that exploited it. According to Koch, Stalin used the anti-Fascist movement as a cover while he and Hitler made arrangements through their secret services to crush domestic enemies. But the trouble with this grand conspiracy theory is that much of it rests on speculation—particularly when Koch discusses how MÅnzenberg's right-hand man, Otto Katz, spun a web of espionage that ensnared Bloomsbury's John Strachey, the notorious Cambridge spy ring, and, in America, Whittaker Chambers and his friends Alger Hiss and Noel Field. Here, Koch resorts to words like ``must have,'' ``probably,'' and ``almost certainly,'' indicating that his hunches will be borne out by the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives. Koch rightly claims that those who led ``double lives'' are crucial to ``the moral life of this century''—but his work rests on too much guesswork, as well as on invective against mostly idealistic, if deluded, 30's liberals.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-918730-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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