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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
