An uncommon first-person account of wartime Russia that deserves a clearer translation.
Grand (Always Beside, 2015) compiles his Russian grandfather’s World War II journal.
Vladimir Mikhailovich Sychev was born in Melenki, Russia, in 1923 and raised by his father and stepmother. His diary, written mostly in the present tense, opens in June 1941 with his secondary school leaving party. The teenager’s sense of foreboding (“I feel a strange uneasiness, as if something were coming”) was apt; the very next morning, he reported to the army’s recruiting office. The following day, the bombing of Kiev provoked Josef Stalin’s declaration of war. Sychev became a platoon commander and then a second lieutenant in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. His journal entries range between a paragraph and several pages; most are dated, so it’s easy for readers to track the passage of time until the 22-two-year-old Sychev finally returned home four-and-a-half years later, having survived a hand injury and time as a prisoner of war in Lithuania and Germany. At the German mining camp, he and his comrades escaped through a lavatory, but were caught the next day. At the last minute, they were spared death by firing squad, and this sequence provides the book’s dramatic highlight. The translation uses slang phrases (“Attaboy!”; “he will face the music!”) to good effect, and preserves the loveliness of Sychev’s spare observations, such as “a wonderful pine forest. Strawberries,” and “Snow, cold, endless digging of trenches, sleeping on the move, sleeping in the snow, burnt quilted jackets, charred boots.” On the way home after the war’s end in 1945, Sychev passed a concentration camp in Berlin’s suburbs—a harrowing experience that prompted one of two poems here. Three black-and-white photographs, plus two contemporary color photos of concentration camp crematoria, help to root the book in history. Unfortunately, there are numerous places where typos produce awkward or nonsensical lines, such as “Death mows people!” and “They organized us high diet.” The occasional choice of obscure vocabulary (“spaddle”; “hebetate”) likewise draws unwanted attention.
An uncommon first-person account of wartime Russia that deserves a clearer translation.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5172-0147-0
Page Count: 122
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and “a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private.”
Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to “control and tame the narrative,” further explaining that she has “so long and so passionately resisted the victim role” because she does not view herself as “purely a victim” and not “purely powerless.” However, she adds, that does not mean she “was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there.” Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: “To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free.”
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2801-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.
From African-American economist and author Sowell, a forthright memoir of growing up the hard way in Harlem—without a father, but with an admirable refusal to compromise one’s principles.
As a grown man, Sowell can now discern helpful guideposts (that would later determine his success) in what was an often frightening and uncertain childhood. He is grateful that he left the South too young to be subjected to its pervasive racism, that he was in public school when its education was still excellent, and that he became a professor before affirmative action called into question many black accomplishments. Born in 1929 in North Carolina, he never knew his own father and was adopted soon after his birth by an aunt. He left the South after an idyllic childhood and moved to Harlem with his mother and two older sisters in 1939. There he entered the local public school, and was soon an outstanding, as well as an outspoken, student. The family was proud of his accomplishments, but when he was accepted at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, they objected to the hours he spent studying instead of earning money, and he had to drop out. Drafted into the Marines during the Korean War, he took advantage of the GI bill to finish high school, as well as attend college, graduating from Harvard. The following years—spent teaching at colleges like Cornell or working in Washington while he finished his dissertation—were often rocky. And he describes his run-ins with obstructive bureaucrats, careerist academics, and bigoted racists, encounters sometimes exacerbated by his often-unpopular political opinions. Though Sowell writes movingly of his son who was a late talker, this is not a personal memoir, but rather an account of a philosophical and professional evolution shaped by a lifetime of challenging experiences.
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86464-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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