The Week in Reviews: 10/28/17
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday). Reviewed by Eric Ciaramella. “All told, some 5 million Soviet peasants — the vast majority of them Ukrainian — perished in the manmade famine that Ukrainians would come to call the “Holodomor” (literally, death by starvation). In this riveting and well-researched new work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum provides a vivid account of the chain of events and calculated political decisions that led to one of the largest, but relatively understudied, mass atrocities of the 20th century. With exacting detail, Applebaum shows how the early Soviet leadership’s two greatest insecurities — its inability to properly feed the industrial working base that brought it to power, and the Ukrainian people’s yearning for an independent state — drove its radical push to forcibly rearrange the Soviet economy and society.”
Happy Dreams: A Novel by Jia Pingwa; translated by Nicky Harman (AmazonCrossing). Reviewed by Clifford Garstang. “The Chinese version of the novel is simply entitled Happy. The English title, though, suits the novel well. Liu’s dreams, while happy, may be somewhat unrealistic. Is the author making a prediction about China’s future? Could it be that the rapid economic development that has left so many behind is doomed to create a permanently disaffected class? If Liu fails in his dream of becoming a Xi’an man, is there any hope for the rest of China’s migrants?”
Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Kenneth Whyte (Knopf). Reviewed by Talmage Boston. “Whyte’s book establishes that, although Hoover did not distinguish himself during his one term in the White House in his extensive efforts at tilting at the Great Depression windmill, the decisions made by Woodrow Wilson (ranked 11th by C-SPAN in the 2017 poll) and Harry Truman (ranked sixth) to put Hoover in charge of post-war European relief efforts were undoubtedly among the best decisions they made during their largely successful presidencies.”
Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves by Marie Jenkins Schwartz (University of Chicago Press). Reviewed by Vivian Bruce Conger. “We can see evidence of this power struggle at play when the enslaved intervened to prevent owners from separating families and communities, refused to work, engaged in willful disobedience, pursued legal disputes, and ran away. Because they lived their lives in the intimate sphere, the close quarters of the household, all three first ladies experienced this give-and-take on a regular basis. As Schwartz explains, their worlds were dominated by issues of race and gender, and they all reacted to these situations in very different ways.”
Where We Lived: Essays on Places by Henry Allen (Mandel Vilar Press and Dryad Press). Reviewed by Susan Storer Clark. “Allen sketches the homes, from Wales to New Jersey, from the Navy ship his father served on to houses in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC; the people who lived in them; and even some of the furniture they had, often in a deft sentence or two. His grandmother ‘had a hyper-genteel way of flicking cigarette ashes — she’d lay the cigarette inside the ash tray and roll it till the ash fell off.’”
Waiting for the Punch: Words to Live by from the WTF Podcast by Marc Maron and Brendan McDonald (Flatiron Books). Reviewed by Barry Wightman. “Organized into sections that reflect the culture of our self-centered times — Growing Up, Sexuality, Identity, Relationships, Parenting, Success, Failure, Mental Health, Mortality, and Life Lessons — Waiting for the Punch is edited like a movie trailer. Super-quick cuts; a little bit of her saying this, of him goofing on that; banality; and the inevitable punchlines are the money shots of the podcast, little potted 21st-century epiphanies we can wrap up and take home.”
Wolf Season: A Novel by Helen Benedict (Bellevue Literary Press). Reviewed by Jenny Ferguson. “What’s striking in Wolf Season is that the novel is as much about the mothers as it is about their children, who, too, are marked by war’s effects: the homegrown American son’s casual racism; the refugee child’s lost limb after a bombing; and a daughter conceived in Iraq but born to American parents who emerges blind from the womb.”
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