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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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