My Life by Bill Clinton, Vintage Books, 2005, 969pp.

It is rare, in a conventional book review, for the reviewer to begin by describing her purchase of the book in question, but in this case it really is part of the story. For I bought My Life, Bill Clinton’s memoir, in the very early hours of the morning at a Washington bookshop which had announced it would put the book on sale at the stroke of midnight, when the embargo ended. Read on »

Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House by Sally Beddell Smith, Ballantine Books, 2006, 686pp.

A week after her husband’s assassination in November, 1963, Jackie Kennedy gave an interview to the writer Theodore White. Passionately declaring that she didn’t want John F. Kennedy immortalised by “bitter” journalists who didn’t appreciate him, she told White that she had come up with her own metaphor for his presidency. She had chosen it, she said, from a line in a Broadway show song that her husband had loved: “Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot, from one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” Read on »

The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: Was Hitler’s Favorite Actress a Russian Spy? by Antony Beevor,
Viking, 2004, 300pp.

At the beginning of May, in 1919, a group of travelling performers from the Moscow Art Theatre set out on a tour of the provinces. The group’s director was the legendary Konstantin Stanislavsky; among its performers was the equally legendary actress wife of the late Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, the tour was not a success. Although the group was billeted in an abandoned hotel in Kharkov which “still retained an air of pre-revolutionary elegance”, the city’s ambience was somewhat lacking. “Nobody had told them that the civil war had erupted again,” writes Antony Beevor in his description of this ill-fated trip. Within days, the troupe found itself cut off from Moscow, on the wrong side – the White side – of the front line in the bloody Russian civil war. Read on »

 Moscow Memoirs by Emma Gerstein (translated by John Crowfoot), Harvill, 2004, 482pp.

Without a doubt, Moscow Memoirs is an extraordinary book, one of those literary memoirs that comes along once a decade. Emma Gerstein, in her nineties when she published it, has shed completely new light on some of the most important poets and writers of the 20th century, providing previously unknown biographical details, some of which will lead to new interpretations of their work. Read on »

Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall
by Andrew Meier, W W Norton & Co Inc, 2005, 516pp.

Anyone who has lived for any length of time in Russia during the past decade will instantly understand why Andrew Meier wrote this book. Meier, who worked in Moscow for Time magazine from 1996 until 2001, probably spent most of his time there doing what most other reporters do: covering news, chasing the things that editors back home consider important, and mentally storing up, for future use, all of the strange scenes, surreal situations and bizarre personalities that reporters rarely manage to squeeze into their stories about the former Soviet Union. Read on »

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To anyone who ever tried to understand why the political left has played such a large role in American intellectual life, or why the term “anti-communist” ever became an insult, or why so many allegedly clear-thinking people feared Joe McCarthy more than Josef Stalin, Ann Coulter’s new book will certainly prove thought-provoking. Read on »

Comrades: the Rise and Fall of World Communism
by Robert Harvey, John Murray, 2003, 422pp.

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Salvador Allende, Mengistu, Castro, Kim Il-sung: the list of murderous communist leaders is long, diverse and profoundly multicultural. Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Angola, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba: the list of countries that have attempted to create communist societies is equally broad. Read on »

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,
by William Taubman, Norton, 2004, 908 pp.

Because he has already been lauded for his extensive research and his psychological insight, I won’t heap further praise on William Taubman, author of a substantial new biography Khrushchev: the Man and His Era. Suffice it to say that he makes extensive use of newly opened archives, carefully parses the Cuban Missile Crisis, pays due attention to Khrushchev’s role in the terror of the 1930s, and includes a healthy sprinkling of the Soviet leader’s favorite insults (”Your view of Soviet power is from inside a toilet!”). Read on »

Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait
by Jerzy Ficowski,(translated by Theodosia Robertson)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2004, 282pp.

Hot and silent, dusty and deserted, the town of Drohobycz seemed, during the few summer days I spent there some years ago, like a place forgotten in time. The houses had a certain faded, Austro-Hungarian glamour, but seemed to have been built for different people, in a different era. The central market square had a certain pleasing symmetry, but practically no business was conducted there. The peasant women who had carved small vegetable gardens out of the tangles of weed that passed for shrubbery looked up suspiciously when a stranger passed, and then looked quickly down again. Read on »

Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence In an American World, by Jedediah Purdy Knopf. 337 pp.

Because no review of Being America can avoid recounting the biography of the book’s author, this one will dispense with the task right at the beginning. Jedediah Purdy is the child of hippie parents who dropped out and moved to West Virginia. Read on »