An important book by two members of a new generation of Russian historians. Using newly (but somewhat arbitrarily) declassified files, they have set out to explore the ``background, psychology, motives, and behavior of Soviet rulers'' from Stalin to Khrushchev. Zubok (Senior Fellow/National Security Archive, Washington) and Pleshakov (Director, Pacific Studies/Institute of US and Canada, Moscow) do not offer any major new interpretations of the period but give instead an infinitely more nuanced understanding of the forces that shaped Soviet policy. Among the surprises: the role played by Stalin in the Korean War, when, after succumbing to Kim Il Sung's pleas to sanction an attack on South Korea, he forced Chinese intervention by being prepared to accept Kim's defeat. Another is the bold policy advocated by Beria (once described by Stalin as ``our Himmler'') after Stalin's death: He was willing to throw over East Germany to secure dÇtente with the West. The authors suggest that the opposition to such moves was partly generational, and that Khrushchev—the ``last true believer''—was in turn overthrown by a new generation ``yearning for personal security'' and led by a group more cynical than revolutionary. Not all of their interpretations are as persuasive: They view Roosevelt and Churchill as helping ``to soothe Stalin's ego,'' providing him with ``an important psychological motive that pushed him in the direction of postwar cooperation.'' That push propelled Stalin, if at all, for a very short time. But their analysis of the group that surrounded Stalin and succeeded him—some well known in the West and others (like Zhdanov, Beria, and Malenkov) less so—is vivid and acute. The most careful, comprehensive, and balanced assessment yet of what Wellington once called ``the other side of the hill.''
Pub Date: May 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-674-45531-2
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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