What the country got in return was a worse ruler, making nostalgia for Alexander a popular sentiment at the time of the...
Spare the knout and spoil the serf: an admiring biography of the 19th-century Russian ruler who ushered in modernizing reforms but was assassinated all the same.
By Russian TV personality and pop historian Radzinsky’s account, Alexander II was a soft touch, inclined to take after his mother, who was “frail and gentle, with azure eyes,” rather than his father, “the indomitable giant” Tsar Nicholas, whose differences apparently “helped create the great harmony of their marriage.” They may have found room to argue over young Alexander, who was altogether nice. When Nicholas asked his son what he would have done with a roomful of plotters arrested in the aborted Decembrist uprising, for instance, Alexander replied that he would forgive them in proper Christian fashion. His father replied scornfully, “Remember this: Die on the steps to the throne, but do not give up power!” When Nicholas finally died, Alexander immediately set about reforms that would be likened to the perestroika of the Gorbachev era, though, Radzinsky adds, “Starting reforms in Russia is dangerous, but it is much more dangerous to stop them.” One reform was the abolition of serfdom, which, Radzinsky writes, occasioned only the briefest of honeymoons between the royals and the growing antimonarchical movement in Russia. The liberals of mid-19th-century Russia saw hope that Alexander would lead the country toward some version of social democracy, but Alexander had no intention of reforming himself out of a job, whereupon the pioneering nihilists and radicals who had been learning their politics from Marx and Bakunin—who make pleasing guest appearances, as does the ever-morose Fyodor Dostoyevsky—set about trying to do the tsar in, attempting to assassinate him on no fewer than six occasions and finally succeeding in March 1881.
What the country got in return was a worse ruler, making nostalgia for Alexander a popular sentiment at the time of the revolution. Those who share that yearning for long-gone royals will find this portrait a pleasure.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7332-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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