VASILY GROSSMAN AND THE SOVIET CENTURY

Name: VASILY GROSSMAN AND THE SOVIET CENTURY
Author: Alexandra Popoff
ISBN: 978-0-300-22278-4

by Alexandra Popoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2019

An essential companion to the ongoing reissue campaign, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, of Grossman’s work in...

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Comprehensive biography of the great Soviet war correspondent, novelist, and dissident.

As a young man, Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) ignored advice to change his patronymic from Solomonovich to Semyonovich, embracing his Jewish heritage in a time of pogroms. He was skeptical about the Bolshevik Revolution, writing in his novel Everything Flows, “in February 1917, the path of freedom lay open for Russia. Russia chose Lenin.” Yet, as Moscow-born journalist and historian Popoff (Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov, 2014, etc.) writes, Grossman weathered tuberculosis and unsatisfying work as a chemist (not in that alone does he resemble the Italian writer Primo Levi) to embark on a literary career. An early novel presaged themes he would follow in later works, namely the sameness of different totalitarian systems; the similarities between Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes would emerge in several of his pieces, which did not endear him to the authorities. He traveled with units of the Red Army throughout World War II as a war correspondent, getting into the thick of Stalingrad, Kursk, and, later, Berlin, providing some of the best reportage on any theater of the war: “The dead sleep on the hills,” he wrote of Stalingrad, “near the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and ravines; they sleep in places where they fought….Sacred land!” His novel Life and Fate, which preoccupied him for years, captured those experiences while repeating his mistrust of totalitarianism. Amazingly, he was not executed, but he constantly ran afoul of Soviet authorities and often endured their “administrative violence.” As Popoff notes in closing, Grossman remains little known in Russia today, in part because of historical amnesia and in part because Vladimir Putin, “who is striving to re-create the Soviet police state," does not brook criticism of Stalin or any equation of Stalinism and Hitlerism.

An essential companion to the ongoing reissue campaign, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, of Grossman’s work in English and of interest to students of literature, journalism, and history alike.

Pub Date: March 26, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-300-22278-4

Page Count: 424

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2019

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
AYN RAND
by Alexandra Popoff

- BOOK REVIEW
TOLSTOY'S FALSE DISCIPLE
by Alexandra Popoff

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WIVES
by Alexandra Popoff

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.