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
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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