A well-written, finely detailed installment in a definitive biography—sure to receive many prize nominations this year.
The massive second volume of the author’s biography of the Russian dictator who went from “learning to be a dictator to becoming impatient with dictatorship and forging a despotism in mass bloodshed.”
Here, we follow Stalin’s murderous consolidation of power in the 1930s in tandem with the parallel rise of Hitler in Germany. Kotkin (History and International Affairs/Princeton Univ.; Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, 2014, etc.) begins with an eerie literary portrait of a rather ordinary man suffering some physical deformities that made him self-conscious; he also displayed coarse manners from his peasant Georgian upbringing and voracious reading habits that drove him always to “better” himself. By 1929, this former seminarian and revolutionary had replaced God with the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and taken the helm of the Soviet state by both chance (“the unexpected early death of Lenin”) and “aptitude,” encapsulating his own personal paranoia within the country’s sense of “capitalist encirclement.” Building an entirely new world through class struggle and socialism was his historical mission, and he would achieve this through whatever means were required. His plan of forced wholesale collectivization involved the liquidation of the kulaks as a class: “These are the inevitable ‘costs’ of revolution,” he wrote in a letter to Maxim Gorky. The drought and severe food shortages of 1931-1933 caused mass flight and the starvation of millions, rendering the country vulnerable to Japanese invasion. By 1937, Stalin’s “obsession with menace,” both domestically and externally, spurred the Great Terror: mass arrests, show trials of “Trotskyites,” and murders of “enemies” far and wide, including the purge of his inner circle and officer corps. Kotkin emphasizes that there was no “dynamic” urging Stalin on, save his own plan “to approve quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people.” He left his military purged of experienced officers and completely unprepared for Hitler’s advance. In this monumental work of research, the author chillingly depicts Stalin’s methodical, “lucidly strategic” rise to murderous despot.
A well-written, finely detailed installment in a definitive biography—sure to receive many prize nominations this year.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-380-0
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
