No comments about Gin Before Breakfast: The Dilemma of the Poet in the Newsroom.

5 comments about A Thousand Suns.

1. 
   
   Dominique Lapierre was one of the twentieth century's most prolific international journalists and a highly prolific author of both novels and historical works, many together with his lifelong coleague Larry Collins.
   In this digest he takes us through some of his greatest journeys and encounters with people who shaped the course of events. He includes some of the encounters behind his joint works with Dominique Lapierre, such as his interview with Ehud Avriel, who helped Jews to escape Hitler's infernos to get to the Holy Land, and gathered together arms to help the fledgling State of Israel survive the overwhelming military force of six Arab armies who attacked the tiny state, as soon as the United Nations agreed to partition of Palestine.
   He also describes the starvation and misery of Jerusalem's Jewish inhabitants during the siege of that city by Arab armies intent on massacring all of Jerusalem's Jews.
   Some of the events described in his article about Avriel, who Lapierre was a good friend of are recorded in O Jerusalem!
   He also recounts his interviews with Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was instrumental in negotiating the independence of India and it's aprtition into the two states of India and Pakistan.
   Lapierre was with Mountbatten a few days Mountbatten's assassination by IRA terrorists in 1979.
   He also recounts his meetings and interviews with the men behind the assasination of Mahatma Ghandi, as result of Gandhi's favorable policies towards India's Moslems.
   These events form part of the bakground to Freedom at Midnight.
   Lapierre details his relationship with the man who was executed for somebody else's crimes, Caryl Chessman, and Chessman's campaign from prison against the death penalty.
   He describes the refusal by General Dieter Von Choltitz refusal to obey Hitler's orders to completley destroy Paris but ignores the evidence that Von Choltitz had been involved in the massacre of Jews in Russia.
   He also writes of his interview with the evil terrorist murderer Kozo Okamoto from the Japanese Red Army Faction, who together with two other psychopathic Communist terrorists murdered 26 Puerto Rican pilgrims in 1972.Interesting that even then those hellbent on murder and destruction chose Israel as their first target for butchery.
   But the world made a lot more sense then, as most the world reviled these horrible terrorists acts, unlike the macabre Orwellian nightmare we are living through today, were so much of the world supports terror against the tiny nation of Israel.
   Interesting even that the first t
   He also writes of his encounters with the great conservationist Rafael Matta in the Ivory Coast, and the authoir's first car and how he acquired the foal of a prize horse in San Tropez France, by the name of Preferido.
   
   Most touching is Lapierre's recounting of work in Calcutta, which the author was involved in with Indian leper and other orphan children
   Lapierre donates half of his royalties to the foundation set up to save these children
   It is heartbreaking to read of their plight and uplifting to read of their joy in life despite their suffering and death all around them. You can read more about these poignant and heartrending accounts in The City of Joy
   "behind every cloud" as the author recounts "there are a thousand clouds."
   Overall a fascinating and exciting read.



2. 1. 'A Thousand Suns', a fascinating book by Dominique Lapierre, famous author of books like `Is Paris Burning' and `City of Joy' takes its title from and Indian proverb that the author chanced upon during his stay in South India. It comes from (as indicated by the author) "Behind every cloud, there are a thousand suns". A perfect message for life in present day's gloomy outlook of life.
   
   2. It goes without saying that the book, which has such a beautiful and motivating title ought to be full of life energy and epitomize everything that is the very essence of meaningful life. This book actually is a byproduct, but a beautiful and useful one. It consists of 15 independent well researched real life stories, which the author encountered in the run up to doing a specific assignment mainly related to the prime characters or places related to these stories, initially as a news correspondent and later as a writer.
   
   3. At the end thus, he filed his reports / wrote his books, but the enduring beauty of life enshrined in the background of these reports / books remained. The author has really done a wonderful service to mankind by writing this book; else such beautiful pearls of human endeavor, wisdom, perseverance and enterprise would have been lost forever.
   
   4. Written in a simple style with stress on delivering the message right, the author might have not achieved perfection of narrative, but what needed to be achieved i.e. delivery of the essentials of beauty of life has been achieved with perfection.
   
   5. It is rightly said that `make your hobby your profession and you would not have to work for a day'. It is evident from reading this book that Mr Lapierre seems to have not worked for a day but have thoroughly enjoyed this life following his passion for writing.
   
   6. All those who have faith in life and mankind and all those whose faith on these is wavering for some reasons must read this book to derive the requisite benefit.



3. After reading Beyond Love and City of Joy, I expected this to be just as good. Two third of the book is interesting - although I discovered what a prejudice author this is - but the nearer I got to the end of the book, the more disappointed I was. I expected a great ending, instead I found a very slow one.



4. This is an interesting book by a man who has obviously had a fascinating life. He takes us across many continents and interviews many people, throwing in anecdotes about his life and interests.

   However what stops me giving this book a 5 star rating is the fact that I feel that some of the topics are given superficial treatment (despite the lengths of the chapters), and there is too much emphasis on the author's own involvement. Fair enough, you might say, it is his book about his experiences, but I feel it is these experiences which should take central stage.

   This is however only a small criticism, and it is a VERY interesting book, about interesting people in interesting times.




5. I have read almost all of Lapierre's books and loved them. They were vivid, well-researched and absolutely riveting. But this book seems dated. He takes old pieces and pieces them into a book. We've been there.

1 comments about The First 80 Years: A Memoir.

1. As a young person in America, I found this book both historically informational as well as extremely moving in its style of honest storytelling. I think anyone in the first 80 years of their life can take something away from this book.

1 comments about Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Judaic Studies Series).

1. If someone had submitted a manuscript based on Ilya Ehrenburg's life to a publisher it would have been tossed away as too unbelievable, even for fiction. Ilya Ehrenburg joined the Bolsheviks as a young man but had broken with the party well before the Russian Revolution. He was a childhood friend of Nikolai Bukharin and spent time with Leon Trotsky in Geneva. While living in Paris before the revolution he was befriended by Lenin but the friendship ended when Ehrenburg mocked him in a satirical piece he had published. He lived abroad for years, both before and after the Revolution, he spoke French and hobnobbed with Europe's literary intelligentsia. He was Jewish. Thousands of people in Stalin's USSR were purged or summarily executed for having just one of these characteristics. Millions were purged for less. Yet Ehrenburg not only survived but prospered. Joshua Rubenstein's "Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg" does an excellent job of setting out the fascinating details of Ehrenburg's life and the many factors that `conspired' to keep Ehrenburg in the public eye and far away from the Gulag.
   
   For those that survived the Holocaust the fact of survival is often an interior matter for the survivor, sometimes marked by remorse and guilt simply because one survived against all odds. For those that survived the purges and executions of the Stalin era in the USSR, the fact of survival is often an exterior matter in which the outside world questions the means by which the survivor escaped unharmed. The historian A.J.P. Taylor, in a review of Ilya Ehrenburg's Memoirs suggest that in "years of danger and crisis, it becomes almost a crime to survive." The fact of Ehrenburg's survival and the means by which he managed to survive is the central theme of Rubenstein's biography.
   
   Rubenstein takes the reader through Ehrenburg's early years as a student revolutionary and his flirtation with the Bolsheviks. The description of Ehrenburg's pre-revolutionary time in Paris and his initial contacts with Lenin and his cadres in exile is particularly interesting. After the revolution, a revolution that Ehrenburg condemned, we see him changing his mind and becoming a staunch supporter of the regime after the Bolsheviks defeated the white army in the Civil War. From there Ehrenburg's years in Paris the 1920s and 1930s where he became well known in artistic and literary circles are outlined very nicely. Ehrenburg became the de facto ambassador of art and literature of the USSR. In fact, it may very well have been Ehrenburg's rather exalted status in the west that protected him all those years. From there we see Ehrenburg's increasing involvement in the anti-fascist movement culminating in his extensive reporting from Spain during the civil war. Ehrenburg survived and prospered despite the fact that Stalin's purges often focused on people who had spent time abroad and who participated in the Civil War. When WWII started Ehrenburg's fame increased as a result of his forceful and intelligent reporting for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. It was during the war that Ehrenburg, along with his colleague Vasily Grossman, began the compilation that became known as the Black Book of Soviet Jewry. The monumental Black Book may very well represent the most important work of Ehrenburg's life.
   
   From the time the war ended and through his death in 1953, Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign and his doctor's plot caused thousands of Jews, including many friends of Ehrenburg to be purged and sent to the Gulag. Through it all, Ehrenburg continued to be published, not without some difficulty in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Ehrenburg became one of the Soviet regime's greatest apologists. As he had done in the 1930's Ehrenburg attacked western left-leaning intellectuals that deviated from the party line. Throughout Stalin's rein and through Khrushchev's leadership Ehrenburg became perhaps the best known and most-intellectually well thought of defender of the Soviet regime. It is for these actions that many find fault with Ehrenburg.
   
   However, at the same time, and within the constraints of an oppressive regime where any untoward step could have severe repercussions, Rubenstein sets out those many instances where Ehrenburg went out of his way to help friends and fellow artists who had been arrested or could not get published. Rubenstein takes pains to point out how many of those who had been imprisoned respected and were grateful for Ehrenburg's efforts on their behalf.
   
   It is the portrayal of this conflict between Ehrenburg's arguably craven kow-towing to the Soviet regime and his efforts on behalf of his friends or fellow writers that make Rubenstein's work so interesting. Rubenstein, and others, fall squarely on the side of absolving Ehrenburg of most of the responsibility for his acts. Nevertheless he does not bludgeon the reader over the head with that opinion nor does he withhold information that might lead a reader to come to a different conclusion.
   
   I tend to fall a bit onto the non-judgmental side of the ledger although not perhaps as fully as Rubenstein. The deciding factor for me is the thought that Ehrenburg's severest critics seem to be those in the west who did not have to walk the deadly tightrope Ehrenburg walked for years. Those that seem most accepting of Ehrenburg's behavior were those who lived and suffered during those years and appreciated Ehrenburg's efforts on their behalf.
   
   Rubenstein's Tangled Loyalties is a fascinating look at the life of someone who spent a life making hard choices. I recommend this to anyone interested in Soviet history and leave it up to the reader to determine whether Ehrenburg was guilty of the crime of survival.
   
   L. Fleisig

2 comments about Fires of the Dragon.

1. Kaplan's book skillfully balances biographical reconstruction with that of the historical and political currents that shaped the lives of the individuals he looks at. Among other things, this is as suspenseful a page turner as any of Eric Ambler's or John Le Carre's best works of fiction. It is also superbly paced and has very few of the redundancies that so often haunt books of this genre.
   
   Kaplan does a superb job at mingling the lives of the principal characters - Henry Liu, the Chiang family back in Taipei, and a wide-ranging cast which includes Taiwanese, Mainland and American spies, government officials, and the criminal underworld - with the laden events of the Nationalists' "loss" of China to the Communists in 1949 and their exile to neighboring Taiwan. The author's portrayal of Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Ching-kuo, and of the repressive security apparatus they relied upon to sustain their power over the island, is thorough and altogether informative. The regime's aggressive intelligence activities overseas, which included influencing foreign governments (namely that in Washington), stealing weapons technology, spying on the Chinese diaspora and dissident groups, and - the backbone of the book - a direct role in the assassination of Henry Liu, a journalist who played all three countries' intelligence services to his advantage, are brought to light with a commendable attention to detail. Buttressing the events so deftly described by Kaplan are the shifting grounds of politics of the period, as Washington switches its recognition from the Republic of China on Taiwan to that of the People's Republic of China. There, too, Kaplan excels at providing just the right amount of information to understand the history of the Washington-Beijing-Taipei triumvirate. Above all, his book demonstrates how the interplay of history and politics can affect the lives of those who choose to be participating citizens, as Henry Liu certainly was.
   
   Even though the book wraps up around 1992, at which point both Chiang father and son had left the scene and been replaced by the reformist Lee Teng-hui, Kaplan's book still manages to retain its immediacy. More than fifty years after Mao's military victory on the Mainland, the Taiwan Strait issue remains unresolved. Not far behind that lingering diplomatic tension lurk old reflexes that, given the right circumstances, could undoubtedly give rise to reprehensible behavior of the kind that is so vividly exposed in this book. Taiwan's transformation, in so little time, from a state ruled by fear into an overwhelmingly vibrant democracy is nothing less than miraculous. Fires of the Dragon provides all the information one needs to fully realize why such a result indeed is the stuff of miracles.



2. This is the thoroughly documented story of the 1984 murder of Henry Liu at his Daly City, CA, home, by the Taiwan intelligence service. The book contains impressive documentation of KMT intelligence operations in the USA, especially in California. For those interested in San Francisco's Chinatown, the book has lots of information about the long struggle between the pro-KMT and pro-PRC partisans. The KMT had all the advantages, including basic criminal immuninity thanks to the cooperation of the FBI. They blew it though, when they overreached by murdering the journalist Henry Liu for his pro China views. The PRC, rightly, is ascendent now.

5 comments about Hemingway In Love And War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Her Letters, and Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway.

1. It is no secret that Ernest Hemingway went to Italy in 1918 with a volunteer ambulance unit, was wounded in the leg, and had an affair with one of the nurses (Agnes Von Kurowsky) while recovering in a hospital. (Many of the scenes in his A FAREWELL TO ARMS are based on these experiences.) This volume contains her diary and letters she wrote to him at the time (his letters to her are lost), as well as a few other pieces. One significant revelation is that it seems their relationship was platonic: when Agnes broke it off she said she felt more like "a mother than a sweetheart" (she was also 7 years older than he was). The letters reveal interesting insights into who Hemingway was at a time before the macho aura completely took over his personality. A so-so movie was based on this book.



2. Its just really a deep analyse of the dream in Ernest his life.
   I agree agree totally with Dr. Verheyen:

   Hemingway and (the false) Agnes in projection of real life!.

   Romance of oné site (Ernest Hemingway anyway).

   I am doctorating in psychology in beautiful Rome: Italy.

   I live back in New York City (after my doctorating?).




3. As a Dr. in Psychology, I can antherstand Hemingway and obvious Agnes. I suppose this romance was to beautiful to hold stand!. Anyway I antherstand 1961( Ernest did suicide WITH Agnes her letters next to him) AFTER 4 TRYING? to forget Agnes! MARRIAGE'S. This prover real eternity love exists, only both have to FORGIVE, and that's the hard way (I do know personnell). They were really made for each other, sad, so sad: stubborn Ernie and WHY?. Dr. Patrick Verheyen (U.S. Graduated ;-).



4. Please, does anyone knows if the book "Hemingway, in love and war" has been traslated in italian?. Thank you very much, Massimo.



5. After seeing the movie "In Love and War" with Sandra Bullock and Chris O'Donnell, I was left wanting to learn more of the events of this tragic love story. The book clued me in to the actual events that led to the affair and the events that occured afterwards and the truth was actually more tragic than the movie had let on. I was once involved in a romance with a much younger man, he was 18 and I was 24, and there was so much passion but eventually the fantasy fades and reality sets in and sometimes you make decisions that at the time seem like the most sane but later on wonder "what if....?" This book is for anyone who has ever loved and lost. A must read for every romantic.

No comments about She Said What?: Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists.

No comments about H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal : A Biography.

1 comments about Happy Days: Mencken's Autobiography: 1880-1892 (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf).

1. H.L. Mencken temporarily resigned from his job as a newspaper columnist before the Second World War, deeming his political opinions too controversial for print. In the ensuing interregnal period, he focused his attention on writing a series of memoirs, which later turned into a three volume autobiography, of which Happy Days is the first part. In its pages, he relates his early fascination with police officers, food, literature and pedagogues, subjects that forever interested him. He also, astonishingly, recounts successful athletic exploits (astonishing because he grew into a rotund and stumpy man, who considered sports "nonsensical"). Readers familiar with Mencken's caustic columns will enjoy learning how his strong opinions were formed. Readers unfamiliar with him should still find this book highly palatable, for it is colorfully written, interfusing "the language of the free lunch counter" with latin phrases and searing adjectives. This memoir is as well-written as later newspaper columnist Russell Baker's "Growing Up," but is a hell of a lot funnier.

No comments about Women of the World: The Great.