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Recommended Reading
David James Fisher calls attention to Orlando Figges's review of "Young Stalin" by Simon Sebag Montefiore,which ran in The New York Review of Books of November 8, 2007. Figges's review noted, "It was significant, and a sign of things to come, that Stalin, by his own admission, preferred the company of criminals to that of revolutionaries, 'because there were so many rats among the politicals.' He always had a loathing and mistrust of revolutionary intellectuals; he suspected them of treachery, kept them at a distance from himself (or simply wiped them out), and relied instead on criminals whose loyalty he could easily manipulate. 'In power,' Montefiore writes, Stalin 'shocked his comrades by promoting criminals in the NKVD [the political police], but he had used criminals all his life."
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Frozen in Amber
Commenting on the release of autobiographies of rock and roll figures Eric Clapton, Pattie Boyd, Ron Wood and Marianne Faithfull, James Marcus in the "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times of November 4, 2007, asks: "When did the '60s end?" His answer follows:
"For a certain segment of the population, however, the '60s may never have ended at all. I'm talking about classic rock stars: those woolly mammoths who continue to roam the Earth, practically flaunting their pickled livers and capped teeth. For them, the gaudy decade has gone on and on, like a kind of prolonged childhood."
Mick Jagger a woolly mammoth?
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Ouch!
In the Times Literary Supplement of October 26,2007, Michael Anderson, reviewing Sara Paretsky's memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, comments:
"But sweet have been the uses of adversity: 'My own sense of voicelessness also led me to see and feel the anguish of the powerless'. The reason she takes the 'side of the underdog' is because 'I'm as needy as the most helpless'. This is the sort of 'progressive' protest that gives bullshit a bad name."
(Anderson is identified only as "writing a biography of playwright Lorraine Hansberry.")
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Worthy of Your Attention
Claudia Roth Pierpont in the November 19, 2007, issue of The New Yorker portrays a three-year span in a dual "biography" explaining "how the rivalry of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier made Shakespeare modern."
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A Note of Introduction
This column is, in effect, a listserve through which registered users may post queries and responses. Once you have registered, thereby becoming a "member" of this non-membership organization, you may post as often as you wish indefinitely. Queries and their associated responses will remain up for five days.
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