It must be 35 years since I first read this book, and it is no less powerful the second time. It recounts a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a prisoner in one of Stalin’s slave-labor camps in Siberia. It is an almost minute-by-minute account, from the time Shukhov first opens his eyes in his upper bunk to when he finally lies down again late at night. In between are hours of labor in the brutal Siberian winter, where a temperature of -27 Fahrenheit is not cold enough to keep the prisoners in for the day. Much of Shulkov’s thoughts and schemes revolve around food: how to hide part of his morning bread ration to eat at night, how to get a portion of the extra bowls of gruel that he snares for his work group, how to befriend a fellow prisoner so he can share in a piece of sausage from a parcel the man has received from home.
The book reveals the tensions, backbiting but also the bedrock camaraderie that binds prisoners in the work group together, their affection for the foreman, a fellow zek who has tremendous influence on work assignments and food allocations, their shared hatred for guards or others who make their lives miserable. For Shukhov there is no dream of eventual liberty here, what concerns him every waking minute are food, survival and maintaining a shred of human dignity under conditions of unimaginable cruelty and privation. The political commentary is all the more devastating for its understatement. What did Zhukov do to merit his 10-year show more sentence? He and a fellow soldier escaped from German captivity during World War II, and when they made it back to Russian lines they were promptly arrested and judged to be spies: in the view of Stalin and his minions, what else could explain the fact that captured soldiers managed to return to their own army? No one can fully understand the barbarism and inhumanity of 20th century totalitarianism, and at the same time the unquenchable human struggle for freedom, without reading this masterpiece. show less
The book reveals the tensions, backbiting but also the bedrock camaraderie that binds prisoners in the work group together, their affection for the foreman, a fellow zek who has tremendous influence on work assignments and food allocations, their shared hatred for guards or others who make their lives miserable. For Shukhov there is no dream of eventual liberty here, what concerns him every waking minute are food, survival and maintaining a shred of human dignity under conditions of unimaginable cruelty and privation. The political commentary is all the more devastating for its understatement. What did Zhukov do to merit his 10-year show more sentence? He and a fellow soldier escaped from German captivity during World War II, and when they made it back to Russian lines they were promptly arrested and judged to be spies: in the view of Stalin and his minions, what else could explain the fact that captured soldiers managed to return to their own army? No one can fully understand the barbarism and inhumanity of 20th century totalitarianism, and at the same time the unquenchable human struggle for freedom, without reading this masterpiece. show less
When we were teenagers, my friends and I thought J.D. Salinger was the height of sophistication: at turns ironic, falling-down funny and forever disdainful of convention and phoniness. This book, at least, hasn't worn that well for me. It consists of two long stories about different members of the Glass family, a theatrical family whose seven children are (were--the eldest, Seymour, killed himself) all brilliant, precocious and either eccentric or crazy, depending on your point of view.
Salinger has wonderfully evocative, comic gifts, which are in full display in the scene, in the first story, of Lane and Franny in the restaurant on the day of the big football game, and in the second story, of Bessie, the mother, insisting on entering the bathroom to carry on an extended conversation while her son Zooey is lounging in the bath.
But neither story has a plot, unless you count the fact that in both stories Franny, the youngest Glass child at age 20, is obsessed with saying the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me) over and over. It's an obsession that disturbs her date, Lane, and her brother, Zooey, though in neither story is there any resolution of this conflict. By the end of the second story, the brilliant dialogue that Salinger writes has become tiresome, while Zooey's constant repetition of how he hates phonies winds up being, you guessed it, phony in its own right.
Salinger has wonderfully evocative, comic gifts, which are in full display in the scene, in the first story, of Lane and Franny in the restaurant on the day of the big football game, and in the second story, of Bessie, the mother, insisting on entering the bathroom to carry on an extended conversation while her son Zooey is lounging in the bath.
But neither story has a plot, unless you count the fact that in both stories Franny, the youngest Glass child at age 20, is obsessed with saying the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me) over and over. It's an obsession that disturbs her date, Lane, and her brother, Zooey, though in neither story is there any resolution of this conflict. By the end of the second story, the brilliant dialogue that Salinger writes has become tiresome, while Zooey's constant repetition of how he hates phonies winds up being, you guessed it, phony in its own right.
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library) by Drew Gilpin Faust
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust
This Republic of Suffering is a very different Civil War book. I'm used to Civil War books that tell the story of battles, campaigns and leaders. This is a book about how an entire society, North and South, dealt with the most pervasive aspect of the war: its indiscriminate slaughter. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, 2% of the population, by far the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans.
In a series of chapters most of whose names consist of just a single word—Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Believing and Doubting, Numbering—Faust examines death from every point of view: the soldiers who fought and died, the families that mourned them, their fellow comrades who struggled to bury them, the civic and religious leaders, writers, poets and ordinary citizens who sought to make sense of the war and its awful toll.
Throughout the book it is the voices of ordinary citizens that we hear, mostly through their letters or diaries, and already in a chapter or two we are already aware of the trauma that this war inflicted on everyone. It changed the way war was waged; it changed the way the army and the society treated the memory those who had fallen. One of the scandalous aspects of the war was how many dead soldiers could not be identified or counted or buried properly. After the war ended the army and the society at large undertook an enormous effort to rebury and identify them. show more This led to a permanent change in the way the U.S. military operated; identifying the dead and protecting and preserving their remains became a core value of military service. Honoring the memory of those dead, through holidays like Memorial Day, was a lasting legacy of the Civil War.
This is a work of immense scholarship, precise and eloquent prose, and lasting impact. show less
By Drew Gilpin Faust
This Republic of Suffering is a very different Civil War book. I'm used to Civil War books that tell the story of battles, campaigns and leaders. This is a book about how an entire society, North and South, dealt with the most pervasive aspect of the war: its indiscriminate slaughter. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, 2% of the population, by far the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans.
In a series of chapters most of whose names consist of just a single word—Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Believing and Doubting, Numbering—Faust examines death from every point of view: the soldiers who fought and died, the families that mourned them, their fellow comrades who struggled to bury them, the civic and religious leaders, writers, poets and ordinary citizens who sought to make sense of the war and its awful toll.
Throughout the book it is the voices of ordinary citizens that we hear, mostly through their letters or diaries, and already in a chapter or two we are already aware of the trauma that this war inflicted on everyone. It changed the way war was waged; it changed the way the army and the society treated the memory those who had fallen. One of the scandalous aspects of the war was how many dead soldiers could not be identified or counted or buried properly. After the war ended the army and the society at large undertook an enormous effort to rebury and identify them. show more This led to a permanent change in the way the U.S. military operated; identifying the dead and protecting and preserving their remains became a core value of military service. Honoring the memory of those dead, through holidays like Memorial Day, was a lasting legacy of the Civil War.
This is a work of immense scholarship, precise and eloquent prose, and lasting impact. show less
I'm a sucker for atmosphere and setting, and Mankell does these very well (Swedish winter: gray, cold, snow, ice: what could be better?). There's nothing particularly appealing about the protagonist, Kurt Wallander, and his relations with those around him--his father, fellow cops, the beautiful prosecutor--are a little too sketchy for full character development. Still,the story moves along smartly and interplay between the setting and the plot development works to a T. This was my first book by Mankell and I liked it well enough to get more.
The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble
At the beginning of Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Sea Lady, Humphrey Clark and Aisla Kelman, summer playmates and sometime adversaries from long ago, are each headed back to Ournemouth, a northern British coastal town, to receive honorary degrees from the university there. Humphrey is a renowned marine biologist; Aisla is a phenomenon--a performer, a TV host, a provocateuse who has both scandalized and wooed her many publics. They haven’t seen each other in 30 years, and while Aisla is aware that they will soon meet again, Humphrey is not. The book takes us back to their childhood days, when they explored the sea, its creatures and each other. It then moves forward to the time when, as young adults, they became lovers, married (briefly) and then separated. And finally it brings us back to the present: Humphrey is on the downward leg of a long academic career; Aisla is still very much in the public eye but must be aware of the fading of her beauty and of her power to charm and astonish.
In this, her most recent novel, Drabble once again displays her talent for precise, muscular, often ironic prose; she has also mastered enough marine biology to sound authoritative on the subject. What was lacking for me was the sense of anticipation that ought to have preceded the reunion of Humphrey and Aisla. Aisla’s character, though fully drawn, failed to elicit the same degree of sympathy as the characters in some earlier Drabble novels (Jerusalem show more the Golden, The Realms of Gold) that I loved, nor did The Sea Lady have the sweep, the bite of social satire, the sense of society being turned topsy turvy that made The Radiant Way memorable. In this newest book I found myself admiring the flow of the prose while remaining strangely uninterested in the drama of what will happen when the former lovers meet again. The ending of The Sea Lady was quite strong. The early parts with their rendering of the intense feelings of childhood, were engrossing, if painful. But the middle of the book dragged, and left me feeling either that I missed something, or that something was missing. show less
At the beginning of Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Sea Lady, Humphrey Clark and Aisla Kelman, summer playmates and sometime adversaries from long ago, are each headed back to Ournemouth, a northern British coastal town, to receive honorary degrees from the university there. Humphrey is a renowned marine biologist; Aisla is a phenomenon--a performer, a TV host, a provocateuse who has both scandalized and wooed her many publics. They haven’t seen each other in 30 years, and while Aisla is aware that they will soon meet again, Humphrey is not. The book takes us back to their childhood days, when they explored the sea, its creatures and each other. It then moves forward to the time when, as young adults, they became lovers, married (briefly) and then separated. And finally it brings us back to the present: Humphrey is on the downward leg of a long academic career; Aisla is still very much in the public eye but must be aware of the fading of her beauty and of her power to charm and astonish.
In this, her most recent novel, Drabble once again displays her talent for precise, muscular, often ironic prose; she has also mastered enough marine biology to sound authoritative on the subject. What was lacking for me was the sense of anticipation that ought to have preceded the reunion of Humphrey and Aisla. Aisla’s character, though fully drawn, failed to elicit the same degree of sympathy as the characters in some earlier Drabble novels (Jerusalem show more the Golden, The Realms of Gold) that I loved, nor did The Sea Lady have the sweep, the bite of social satire, the sense of society being turned topsy turvy that made The Radiant Way memorable. In this newest book I found myself admiring the flow of the prose while remaining strangely uninterested in the drama of what will happen when the former lovers meet again. The ending of The Sea Lady was quite strong. The early parts with their rendering of the intense feelings of childhood, were engrossing, if painful. But the middle of the book dragged, and left me feeling either that I missed something, or that something was missing. show less
When Elaine Gordon's husband Neil, a psychiatrist, suddenly drops dead of an aneurysm, Elaine is devastated by the loss. She sets out to discover a new relationship with her four adult children, while at the same time finding solace in her art. She is a skilled and creative ceramicist whose works are in demand around the country. From her home in Westchester, NY she travels to the homes of each son and daughter for extended visits: with Sarah, mother of four and living in an Orthodox community in Jerusalem; with Peter, a driven movie producer in LA whose marriage is in jeopardy; with Lisa, Sarah's twin, a successful physician desperate to adopt a child; and with Denis, a gay lawyer living with his partner in Santa Fe. Observing their lives at close range, sharing their pains and joys, intervening when necessary to help them deal with personal crises, she rediscovers a bond with her children and grandchildren. In the process, new experiences and new sights give her renewed inspiration for her art. In "Open Doors," author Gloria Goldreich gives us a sensitive, finely wrought portrait of a strong woman who surmounts the tragedy of death to rededicate herself to life.