A well-crafted, constantly revealing study of the world-altering changes of recent history.
A sturdy examination of events that led to the collapse of Eastern Europe’s communist regimes.
The “classic narrative,” writes former Evening Standard reporter Sebestyen (Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 2006, etc.), of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War lays huge credit at the door of Ronald Reagan. Humbug, he replies. The United States and its allies won the Cold War because of a policy of containment that had stretched out for four decades. Reagan accomplished nothing toward that end until, in his second term, he relaxed his bellicose attitude and “tried a new, more conciliatory approach” that led to meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. If anything, to judge by Sebestyen’s episodic, skillfully narrated account, Gorbachev deserves more acknowledgment than ever for his work in dismantling the Soviet Union. Though that may not have been his intention, his decision not to meet with the faltering leaders of Bulgaria and Romania and to keep Soviet troops off the streets of East Germany and Czechoslovakia made it easier for the revolutions there to gather force. Polish-born pontiff John Paul II was another architect of those great revolutions, as Soviet leader Yuri Andropov presciently warned when he predicted that the pope’s election “could foreshadow disaster for the Soviet empire.” Indeed it did, and so quickly did those revolutions unfold—ten years in the case of Poland, as it was said at the time, but only ten days for Czechoslovakia—that it was the leaders of the West, notably George H.W. Bush, who found themselves supporting the Soviets and advising Soviet leaders that they would look the other way were the Brezhnev doctrine to be invoked. Sebestyen’s book contains all the familiar cast of characters, including Dick Cheney (who predicted that Gorbachev would be ousted by a strong-arm communist leader), Brent Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice.
A well-crafted, constantly revealing study of the world-altering changes of recent history.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42532-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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 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
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