An intriguing look at Russia's most talked about politician. Kartsev (former director both of the Mir publishing house and of publications at the UN), with former Mir editor Bludeau, presents a colloquial account of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who for a time was legal counsel at Mir. The central question that frames the book is ``How was the Zhirinovsky phenomenon possible?'' Zhirinovsky and his misnamed Liberal Democratic Party won 25% of the national vote in December 1993, according to Kartsev, because of the debilitating and bewildering effects of bespredel. The word, which has no English equivalent, means ``laissez-faire gone mad...the abrogation of tradition, the rules of the game, the rules of conduct and, at times, even fundamental decency and common sense.'' Like many 20th-century demagogues, Zhirinovsky has always been an outsider and never subtle in his professed hatred for the ``system.'' As a populist, he tailors his words to his audience, but a common denominator in all his rhetoric is Russian nationalism. Kartsev claims that in his autobiography, Zhirinovsky writes about nationalism ``with dignity''; this is difficult to reconcile with his more outrageous claims on Alaska and desire to see Russian soldiers ``washing their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.'' Zhirinovsky's philosophy of Russian history likens events to sexual perversities: The Stalin era ``can be compared to homosexuality, the Khrushchev years to masturbation, and Brezhnev to impotence.'' The virile Zhirinovsky promises the Russian people ``a real orgasm for the first time in your lives.'' Perhaps the strongest asset of the book is not so much the profile of Zhirinovsky, but the illumination of the contemporary Russian landscape where the rush to embrace capitalism has transformed privatization into piratization and spawned a vicious form of organized crime. If, as this insider argues, bespredel represents socialist morality in reverse, then Zhirinovsky mirrors the disturbing realities of that reversal. (11 b&w photos)
Pub Date: May 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-231-10210-0
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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