The author’s wit and biting analysis render this a most readable study.
What first appears to be a narrowly academic profile of two rival scholars amplifies into a trenchant, engaging study of the postwar split between the New Left and Western liberalism.
Historian Caute (Politics and the Novel During the Cold War, 2009, etc.) was privy to Isaiah Berlin’s attempts to blackball Isaac Deutscher from gaining an academic post in 1963, when the author and Berlin were both fellows at All Souls College, Oxford. In this sharply argued work, the author develops and clarifies their feud in light of Cold War attitudes. Both brilliant minds who hailed from Eastern European Jewish families and eventually took refuge in England from totalitarian violence, the two writers, journalists and historians made their way in British academia and publishing with remarkable success, though with vastly different ideological takes regarding the Soviet Union. As the Cold War ramped up, both became enormously in demand to delineate the struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. For Berlin, the notion of individual liberty and responsibility dispelled any illusions about Soviet reality and Marxist determinism, while Deutscher, whose formative years were spent as a member of the Polish Communist Party, was a well-connected Marxist whose deeply researched biographies of Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin were considered as helpful explanations to the West as well as apologies. Recognized as an international relations expert, Deutscher hoped to move from journalism to academia but was thwarted by Berlin, serving on the advisory board, who denounced his rival in confidential letters as being “morally intolerable.” Caute astutely probes the contentious issues, including concepts of history, Zionism and life for dissident writers in the Soviet Union.
The author’s wit and biting analysis render this a most readable study.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-19209-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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