Review by Choice Review
In the introduction, White (history and literature, Harvard) describes his book as a "group biography" of more than 20 authors hailing from "both sides of the Iron Curtain," but also insists that the book "does not pretend to give a comprehensive account of the Cold War." Although these two statements are not inherently contradictory, they testify to the lingering sense that this ambitious and well-researched project has a scope that is simultaneously too specific and too immense to be handled effectively. White readily acknowledges some of the limitations engendered by his selection of writers, but he barely comments on his decision to begin his discussion of writerly involvement in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the West (primarily represented here by the US and Great Britain) in the mid-1930s. The Soviet "show trials" and the Spanish Civil War doubtlessly anticipated and influenced the Cold War, but White's intermingling of literary biography and geopolitical intrigue claims far more categorical continuity across his 1934--1991 timeline than is demonstrated. For example, the inclusion of Isaac Babel, who died in 1940, seems wholly based on his opposition to Stalin, a tenuous (at best) definition of a "cold warrior." This book is best suited to general readers, but marginal for academic use. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students; general readers. --Derek C. Maus, State University of New York College at Potsdam
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
In 1948, when Arthur Koestler tried to punch Jean-Paul Sartre in a Paris bar but ended up blackening the eye of Albert Camus instead, bystanders saw only a scuffle between angry men. White, however, recognizes a skirmish in an ideological war pitting authors defending democratic capitalism against writers supporting Soviet communism. From this painstakingly researched narrative, readers will learn about how George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Andrei Sinyavsky, and many others (including Koestler and Sartre) deployed their skills on the Cold War's most hotly contested literary battlefields. Readers see how Orwell distilled his hard-won insights into Soviet perfidy into the pellucid fable Animal Farm, how McCarthy was launched on an ideological crusade by a single question from James Farrell, how Sinyavsky inspired an unprecedented public protest in Moscow by defying Soviet censors in the name of literary autonomy. White illuminates the precarious place of literature in a world swarming with spies eager to manipulate even to enlist authors to advance their shadowy agendas. Readers witness the ruthless brutality of Soviet authorities imprisoning and executing dissident writers, but they also penetrate the deceptions of American and British intelligence agencies playing authors as pawns. A compelling reminder of literature's influence and vulnerability in a world of power politics.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
During the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, writers were warriors, literature a weapon.Daily Telegraph book reviewer White (History and Literature/Harvard Univ.; Nabokov and His Books, 2017, etc.) returns with a massive, thoroughly researched history of the roles of writers and literature during the Cold War. His focus is not just on the United States and the Soviet Union; he also tells stories about Western Europe and Latin America (there is a chapter on Nicaragua, the Contras, and Ronald Reagan). Many celebrated writers glimmer in these pages, including George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, Isaac Babel, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, John le Carr, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ernest Hemingway. Names probably less familiar to general readers are the Soviet writers Anna Akhmatova and Andrei Sinyavsky. The narrative is mostly chronological, and White shifts focus, chapter by chapter, to various writers and the political realities that they had to faceand endure. He also shows how governments tried to influence (or silence) their own writers and how they tried to use literature both as a weapon and a shield. "The issue of complicity is at the center of this book," he writes. "Every writer in these pages had to grapple with it in one form or anothersuch was the price to be paid for writing at a time when, to paraphrase historian Giles Scott-Smith, to be apolitical was itself a form of politics." White delivers tales of astonishing couragee.g., the Czech playwright Vclav Havel emerging from persecution and prosecution to become his country's president, Solzhenitsyn sticking firmly to his determination to tell his storiesand of duplicity and betrayal: The story of Kim Philby, the English traitor, is prominent. Many readers will be surprised by the connections among these writers, which White ably highlights: Orwell and Hemingway, Koestler and McCarthy, and so many others. The author also occasionally summarizes now-classic literary works (Animal Farm).Both profound and profoundly important and as engaging as a gripping Cold War thriller. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
