Lieven (a political historian at the London School of Economics whose specialty is imperial Russia: Russia's Rulers Before the Revolution, 1989, etc.—not reviewed) reinterprets the life and political significance of Nicholas II in light of the USSR's collapse. Unlike Edvard Radzinsky in his magisterial Last Tsar (1992)- -which depicted Nicholas as doting, charming, and ineffectual—and Marc Ferro in Nicholas II (p. 274)—which portrayed the Russian ruler as a politically naive, pleasure-loving king in the tradition of Louis XVI—Lieven presents Nicholas as an anachronism, a patriarchal leader crippled by tradition, bureaucracy, and an inability to deal with the social and technological changes that challenged his authority. As a political leader, Lieven says, Nicholas failed to deal with the abysmal poverty of the peasants and overreacted to the ``Yellow Peril,'' expending resources in a wasteful and remote war with Japan. Surrounded by a bureaucracy, as well as by a jealous and petty aristocracy, he ran the government as a family business that both isolated him from the contemporary world and caused him to fritter away his time on trivia: This ruler of 150 million had no personal secretary and answered all his own correspondence. Rasputin gained power, Lieven explains, because he represented the faith of the peasants, on which Nicholas relied. By comparing Nicholas with other monarchs in Japan, Germany, and especially Persia (in the figure of the shah, whom Nicholas resembled in many personal ways), Lieven introduces an international context to explain the inevitability of the tsar's destruction in a terrible incongruence of time, temperament, and talent. In the chapter dealing with Nicholas's execution, the author displays a skill at dramatic writing that's equal to his cool and dispassionate political analysis—an analysis that culminates in his discussion of the relevance of Nicholas to Russia's struggle to recover its sense of identity after the collapse of Communism. A rare balance of personal and political insight: timely and persuasive.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10510-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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