BOOK REVIEW: Lack of 'primacy in consumer goods' delegitimized USSR vis-à-vis capitalist West

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In contemplating the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Sheila Fitzpatrick reminded readers in a March 2012 LRB review of five books about Stalinism, it is important to remember that "Crude was bad on the European stage but in the end good in the Russian Communist Party.  In the succession struggle after Lenin’s death, the crude men won" — men who "lack[ed] foreign languages and cosmopolitan polish."[1]  --  Stalin's wariness of Westerners amounted to xenophobia and is often attributed to paranoia, but another source was ignorance.  --  Paradoxically, however, under Stalin the USSR made a concerted bid for leadership of cosmopolitan high culture, as one of the books under review recounts.  --  The attractions of Western pop culture stimulated official opposition from the 1940s on.  --  "[T]here was too much defensiveness in this xenophobic period to support a Soviet sense of cultural mission."  --  Ultimately, the volumes reviewed here suggest, failure to achieve "primacy in consumer goods" undermined the USSR's political legitimacy in the struggle with the capitalist West....

BOOK REVIEW: James Joyce's 'extraordinary ability to be unaffected by World War I'

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A new biography "fram[es James] Joyce as an essentially religious figure," a review in the New York Review of Books noted recently.[1]  --  Gordon Bowker's James Joyce: A New Biography may be "the most comprehensive compendium of information on Joyce’s life yet written," but reviewer Fintan O'Toole shows little sympathy and even less comprehension of what it might mean to consider Joyce as a "religious figure." ...

BOOK REVIEW: Richard Burton's diaries published -- 'Come for the love story, stay for the lit talk'

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Actor Richard Burton "often read as many as three books a day and hated anything or anyone getting in his way," which helps to make his diaries, published this month by Yale University Press, quite interesting, albeit not as interesting as his abiding passion for Elizabeth Taylor, according to New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner.[1]  --  “'I am as thrilled by the English language as I am by a lovely woman or dreams,' he writes, 'green as dreams and deep as death.'  That last clause is a reference -- these diaries are wrinkled with such allusions -- to a poem by Rupert Brooke."  --  Last week Cynthia Grenier, writing for the Washington Times, agreed that Burton's writing in his diaries are "quite remarkable," "downright compelling," and "utterly involving, fascinating reading."[2]  ...

  1. BOOK REVIEW: Today philosophers are more interesting than philosophy (Freeman Dyson)
  2. BOOK REVIEW: Computations for H-bombs funded by AEC birthed the digital revolution
  3. COMMENTARY: 'Betrayal of mentors,' not Internet, caused the collapse of literary culture
  4. COMMENTARY: Kennedy missile crisis myth playing unhelpful role in US-Iran stand-off
  5. BOOK REVIEW: Neither 'planning' nor 'design' involved in evolution
  6. BACKGROUND: Blaming the amygdala may be a bit premature
  7. BOOK REVIEW: Ideas on democracy ignoring energy realpolitik nothing but quaint tales
  8. BOOK REVIEW: Vargas Llosa's novelization of Roger Casement falls short (LRB)
  9. BACKGROUND: New book reveals documents on FBI's war on Berkeley dissenters & Ronald Reagan, informer
  10. BOOK REVIEW: 'Apathy is its own 3rd dimension' (Bradley Manning)