A movingly illuminating biography.
A prizewinning French writer tells the story of how a Soviet meteorologist lionized by Stalin was wrongfully imprisoned and executed during the Great Purge of the 1930s.
Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim (1881-1937) was a distinguished weather scientist. Appointed the first director of the Soviet Union’s Hydrometeorological Centre in 1929, he worked tirelessly to promote the interests of the Communist Party. He believed that the Soviet Union’s ascendancy as a world power lay in its ability to convert wind into electricity that would heat and light its vast terrain. As Rolin (Hotel Crystal, 2008, etc.) writes, “[Wagenheim’s] role in the construction of socialism was to help the revolutionary proletariat control the forces of Nature.” His work was recognized by Stalin, who praised the scientist as a national hero for his help in ensuring the success of one of the Soviets’ high altitude balloon experiments in 1933. Then a colleague implicated him in the activities of what he claimed was a counterrevolutionary organization within the Hydrometeorological Centre. In January 1934, authorities imprisoned an innocent and utterly dumbfounded Wangenheim—who was also a descendant of the hated Russian aristocracy—without ever telling him the exact nature of his crimes. The meteorologist was eventually sent to northwestern Russia, where he spent the last three years of his life doing forced labor in Stalin’s gulag system while stubbornly clinging to his socialist beliefs. Part of what makes this book so fascinating is the way Rolin, using letters and other historical documents, depicts the unswerving nature of Wangenheim’s faith in the Communist Party despite his mistreatment. The real horror is not so much the fate he and his gulag comrades suffered, but the extremes to which they were subjected before they even began to question the political system they held so dear. Timely and well-researched, the book is a reminder of the real, human cost of blind loyalty to totalitarian political ideologies.
A movingly illuminating biography.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-781-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
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