PositiveThe Washington PostIn a provocative and sympathetic new biography, Brian J. Boeck accepts the likelihood of literary genesis emerging from a long-since destroyed set of documents, but he argues that Sholokhov conjured this raw material—sketches, newspaper clippings, letters, notebooks, diary entries and an unfinished novel—into an original work ... Sholokhov in this telling forced his way into literary greatness ... The man from the provinces, who never made Moscow his home, sparked his genius on his own rough stone ... Boeck forces us to reconsider [Sholokov\'s popular] biography, at least in part, and that is no small achievement.
