MixedThe Guardian (UK)A dozen lucid portraits of the leaders – half of them dictators, the others democrats, to varying degrees – who shaped Europe’s 20th century ... Kershaw fills his lively profiles with revealing details of the leaders’ characters, their working style and relations with the ruling structures that supported them ... Kershaw is at his most masterful in his sketches of the three German leaders in this book. He is also very good on Mussolini and De Gaulle. He is less convincing on Lenin and Stalin, where his reliance on secondary sources makes for a flat and conventional account ... Kershaw devotes the final chapter to a summing up of the factors that defined the exercise of power by all 12 leaders in the book. His purpose, as he tells at the start, is to test seven propositions about personal leadership. They are all fairly obvious ... There is much to be admired in Kershaw’s cogent and astute analysis of these leaders in power, but I’m not sure there are any general lessons to be learned.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Bela Shayevich
MixedNew York Review of BooksThe book is Alexievich’s most ambitious project to date ... The picture of contemporary Russia that emerges in these pages is extremely dark—a bleak landscape populated by poor, depressed, humiliated people, damaged and embittered, homeless refugees from ethnic wars, criminals and murderers, with little space for hope or love ... My main issue with the book has not to do with its darkness but with my uneasy sense that many of its stories have been chosen for dramatic and sensational effect ... By careful listening and editing, she turns the transcripts of an interview into a spoken literature that carries all the truth and emotional power of a great novel. But the most dramatic stories are not always representative ... There should, I thought, have been more information about the background of the person being interviewed...and the location of the dialogue ... Although the interviews are grouped by decade...they are undated individually, leaving readers to guess when the conversation might have taken place. This is a serious shortcoming, because the Soviet Union looked very different in 2001 than it did to its supporters in 1991, and in oral history the political setting of the interview is always important. But these are issues that do not detract from a very impressive achievement. Alexievich has given voice to a lost generation who feel betrayed, cheated out of their own lives by history. By listening to them, the humiliated and insulted, we can learn to respect them.
Douglas Smith
MixedThe New York Review of Books...if Smith’s examination of these stories is not new, it is the most exhaustive, based on research in many archives and delivering the final word on every scrap of evidence in newspapers and memoirs. The result is a book that is overlong, overcrowded with names and details, serious and earnest (there are few jokes), but a valuable corrective to the more sensational and fanciful biographies available in English ... Smith does not discuss the failure of the monarchy to control its public image (or even recognize that it might have been a problem). But he describes well the revolutionary atmosphere created by the spread of these rumors in 1916.
Julian Barnes
RaveThe New York Review of BooksThe Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich is the man remembering in Barnes’s The Noise of Time, a novel that, like Flaubert’s Parrot, mixes fiction and biography, memory and myth ... But unlike Flaubert’s Parrot, which revels in the impossibility of ever reconstructing a biography, The Noise of Time makes just that claim. In it Barnes assumes a knowingness about the private thoughts and emotions of Shostakovich, a knowledge largely based on memoirs about him, and asks us to believe that he is taking us inside his head ... From the disjointed fragments of the opening paragraphs, the reader has the confidence of being in the hands of a master storyteller, knowing that these images will all return with symbolic significance... Barnes has a good sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union. He captures well the black humor, irony, and cynicism that pervaded the intelligentsia circles in which Shostakovich moved.
