A defining conflict that still fascinates, explored here by a master of the literary and the political.
Koch (Double Lives: Espionage and the War of Ideas, 1994, etc.) revisits the rude coming-of-age for American intellectuals in a deeply thoughtful, trenchant examination of a literary friendship soured during the Spanish Civil War.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was thought to be “the great transforming convulsion” that intellectuals all over the world had been waiting for: the defining struggle at last between the radical fascist right, led by General Franco, and radical left, led by the elected Spanish government. Yet, as a few perceptive writers, like modernist truth-seeker John Dos Passos, quickly discovered, the cause wasn’t quite so clear cut, especially since the left—the Popular Front—was financed and factionalized by the Soviet Comintern as it worked for Stalin and the appeasement of Hitler. When “Dos” discovered that his dear friend Jose “Pepe” Robles, a Spanish teacher chosen by the Soviet leadership to act as a kind of liaison to the Republic, had been dragged from his home at night and later shot on trumped-up charges of treason, Dos worked tirelessly to convince others, including Hemingway, of the shifting shades of treachery. However, for “Hem,” the war was an intense experience necessary for renewing his artistic and emotional health, and thus he could easily be manipulated by the Soviet agents into swallowing the official line. As his paranoia grew, Hem attacked and humiliated Dos publicly, ending the friendship. Koch’s previous research into Comintern’s propaganda czar Willi Munzenberg allows him a terrific grasp of the events that brought the war in Spain and the Great Terror of 1936–38 into perfect coincidence; he exposes the insidious apparatchik Joris Ivens and his propaganda film, The Spanish Earth, so adored by leftist America, and examines the double lives of many of these characters. He often treats Hem with savage sarcasm and Dos with sympathetic kid gloves, but it makes a whopping good literary tale.
A defining conflict that still fascinates, explored here by a master of the literary and the political.Pub Date: April 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-280-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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