This frank and revelatory memoir portrays in rich detail Russia’s recent past and illuminates the consequences of its...
Memories of life behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1997, Lungina (1920-1998), a literary translator, spent a week with director Oleg Dorman, recounting her life for a 15-part documentary. Aired in Russia in 2009, the series was hugely popular, and the script, transcribed, translated and augmented with some additional material, has resulted in this disarmingly candid memoir. Born in Russia to Jewish parents, Lungina spent her childhood in Germany and France, returning to Moscow in 1934. The city in those days, she recalled, “was very poetic,” with milkmaids delivering milk and sledges carrying Muscovites through icy streets. Soon, though, she became aware of endemic political oppression: Friends’ fathers were arrested, some friends were expelled from her school, and when she protested the stupidity of that policy, she was expelled, too. “I think this was the definitive moment in my disenchantment with the system, and my final rejection of it,” she said. Yet despite waging a reign of terror, Stalin was revered. Lungina explains her contemporaries’ psychology as “a kind of religious psychosis” caused partly by the strength of Stalin’s personality and partly by Russia’s cultural isolation. Art and literature needed to conform to socialist realism. After World War II, Lungina imagined that Russians who fought throughout Europe would return with a new desire for freedom, but Stalin quashed that desire. Calling people “cogs in a machine,” he enacted a stringent policy of surveillance and incited betrayal, denouncement and virulent anti-Semitism. Much of Lungina’s memoir focuses on the plight of the intelligentsia, which included herself (she translated, among many other writers, Astrid Lindgren, Heinrich Boll and August Strindberg); her husband, a playwright and director; and their friends, who included poet Joseph Brodsky and novelists Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Life taught me,” she said, “that intellectual courage is much harder to muster than physical courage.”
This frank and revelatory memoir portrays in rich detail Russia’s recent past and illuminates the consequences of its history for the turbulent present.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1468307320
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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