A compelling, cleareyed portrait of a dictator whose politics have unfortunate relevance for today.
An illuminating new biography of the cold, calculating ruler on whom the subsequent Soviet state modeled itself.
“Secretive, suspicious, intolerant, acetic, intemperate.” Such is the essence of the portrait of his subject that Budapest-born journalist Sebestyen (1946: The Making of the Modern World, 2015, etc.) extracts from the considerable record. The author does not overwhelm with detail, and he focuses especially on how Lenin’s most important relationships were with women, such as his mother, his wife, Nadya, and his mistress, Inessa Armand. From his beginnings as a brilliant youth to his maturation as a driving, relentless intellectual whose favored method of leadership was merciless carping, Lenin was consistently concerned with the nitty-gritty of power and how to attain it. He was also criticized for fleeing from trouble, as he believed he was too important to the struggle to get arrested. Radicalized at the age of 18 after the “violent drama” of his beloved older brother Sasha’s execution by the czar’s police force in 1887 for attempting to assassinate the czar, Vladimir Ulyanov, as he was then known, “was heir to a long tradition of revolutionary opposition to the Tsars.” Prohibited from studying at university, sent briefly to Siberia, closely monitored by the czar’s police state, the Okhrana (from which Lenin’s Cheka would subsequently and ironically derive its model), and largely supported in every way by his mother and wife, Lenin moved about in exile honing the revolutionary message. Although not as eloquent a writer as Marx or Trotsky, Lenin created a style of argument altogether his own; as the author writes, “he was nearly always domineering, abusive, combative and often downright vicious.” Operating brutally but haphazardly, rather than by a truly coordinated effort, and not averse to using a “criminal gang” to steal on the party’s behalf, Lenin prevailed by sheer force of will. Sebestyen ably captures the man, “the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies.”
A compelling, cleareyed portrait of a dictator whose politics have unfortunate relevance for today.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-87163-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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
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