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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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