A defining conflict that still fascinates, explored here by a master of the literary and the political.
Koch (Double Lives: Espionage and the War of Ideas, 1994, etc.) revisits the rude coming-of-age for American intellectuals in a deeply thoughtful, trenchant examination of a literary friendship soured during the Spanish Civil War.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was thought to be “the great transforming convulsion” that intellectuals all over the world had been waiting for: the defining struggle at last between the radical fascist right, led by General Franco, and radical left, led by the elected Spanish government. Yet, as a few perceptive writers, like modernist truth-seeker John Dos Passos, quickly discovered, the cause wasn’t quite so clear cut, especially since the left—the Popular Front—was financed and factionalized by the Soviet Comintern as it worked for Stalin and the appeasement of Hitler. When “Dos” discovered that his dear friend Jose “Pepe” Robles, a Spanish teacher chosen by the Soviet leadership to act as a kind of liaison to the Republic, had been dragged from his home at night and later shot on trumped-up charges of treason, Dos worked tirelessly to convince others, including Hemingway, of the shifting shades of treachery. However, for “Hem,” the war was an intense experience necessary for renewing his artistic and emotional health, and thus he could easily be manipulated by the Soviet agents into swallowing the official line. As his paranoia grew, Hem attacked and humiliated Dos publicly, ending the friendship. Koch’s previous research into Comintern’s propaganda czar Willi Munzenberg allows him a terrific grasp of the events that brought the war in Spain and the Great Terror of 1936–38 into perfect coincidence; he exposes the insidious apparatchik Joris Ivens and his propaganda film, The Spanish Earth, so adored by leftist America, and examines the double lives of many of these characters. He often treats Hem with savage sarcasm and Dos with sympathetic kid gloves, but it makes a whopping good literary tale.
A defining conflict that still fascinates, explored here by a master of the literary and the political.Pub Date: April 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-280-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech’s medical school, and it’s his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man’s troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skill—he has a talented diagnostician’s observant eye and a gift for description—but also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David’s story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017405-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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