Furst, Alan:Red Gold; A Novel
- gebunden oder broschiert 2023, ISBN: 9780679451860
Content appears as new, unopened, unread & unblemished in red/gold gilt, cloth boards displaying no significant surface/edge wear, in DJ displaying minor surface/edge wear as shown. Repai… Mehr…
Content appears as new, unopened, unread & unblemished in red/gold gilt, cloth boards displaying no significant surface/edge wear, in DJ displaying minor surface/edge wear as shown. Repaired/reinforced closed tear top back.Kirkus Review: The biographer of Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin. . . can't miss with Trotsky, whose life is arresting in bare chronology. To Payne he is the Aichemedean "who found the right lever and the right place to insert it," and proceeded to move the world; and Payne pursues him through a breathless sequence: from his beginnings as an audacious young rebel in and around Odessa, opposed to the ""dryness and hardness"" of Marxists but intent on first finding, then organizing the workers; to the brilliant oratorical feats of 1905 and 1917; to Red Army command during the Civil War riding victoriously through Russia on his "locomotive of history"; to the pathetic long finale--Trotsky exiled and hounded by Stalin, but also rejected by every other government: "Never had there been such unanimity among monarchy, the capitalists, and the Communists." If the book cannot help but move fast, it does not reach deep. For lack of historical background and analysis, the dilemmas of the period within which Trotsky's theories and actions alone make sense, fail to project. Never, for instance, is War Communism even named, although it is the system which, from 1918 to 1921, ruled the young Soviet republic, Trotsky's dynamic stage. Consequently the giants of the Revolution--Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin--loom larger than they should, seeming to choose freely between good and evil. Payne's portrait of Trotsky, the "old Bolshevik trapped within the murderous machine he helped to create," doubles as a morality lesson, more likely--whatever its faults--to engage the casual reader than Deutscher's celebrated three-volume classic, which remains unsurpassed.Insurance & handling is included free. Extra Charges/Fees apply on Shipments Outside The U.S. and Expedited Shipments. Oversize and/or heavy books may require additional fees. Will advise Updated 10.02.2023 Written 5.15.2021AK #5033-60821 Img #6222, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1977, 4, London: McGibbon & Kee, 1966. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 253, [3] pages. Footnotes. DJ has wear, scuff, tears, soiling and chips. Starts with The Message of the Hungarian Revolution and then addresses Part 1: Hungary and the World; Part 2: Hungary Ten Years After. Stephen Barlay has contributed, as Appendix I and II, a thorough bibliography of the Revolution, and a most useful chronology of events. No event has moved the conscience of the free world as deeply as the Hungarian revolution of 1956. No other event has assumed such equivocal political significance in the space of ten years. This historic moment can best be characterized by the psychoanalytical formula of over-determination, the plurality of meanings inherent in a single act, a single thought. Published in the tenth year after the Hungarian rising, this book examines that particular watershed in the history of postwar communism as well as setting out its origins and possible consequences. Hungary 1956 was not just an event that held the world enthralled but helpless: it led to radical changes within the country and within the entire Soviet bloc. The Russian leaders could not afford again to find themselves so obviously on the opposite side of popular forces. In a comparable way, the Western powers began to realize that to back revolution without the ability to give effective support was an act without any promise of success. Between them, the contributors to this volume help to explain the significance of the first major revolt against Russian hegemony in southeast Europe after the war, and to look at the future implications as well as past horrors. Tamás Aczél (16 December 1921 - 18 April 1994) was a Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian poet, writer, journalist and university professor. Initially, Aczél came out with poems; the first collection of these was published in 1941. Later, being favored by the postwar Hungarian government, he wrote agitational poems and schematic novels, for them he was awarded the Kossuth Prize (1949) and the Stalin Prize (1952). By 1953 Aczél radically broke with his earlier works; he gave up his an agitative poetry and became a leading figure of the literary opposition formed around Imre Nagy, that initiated the dismissal of the Stalinist-Rákosist literary control. After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was repressed, Aczél fled the country and emigrated to England (1957-1966), before eventually settled in the United States (1966-1994). He became one of the best-known figures of the Hungarians emigrants and did a lot to make the story of the Hungarian Revolution more known. In the United States he was a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst until his death., McGibbon & Kee, 1966, 2.75, New York: Random House, 1999. First Edition [stated]. Presumed to be first printing based on Random House convention. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Jerry Bauer (Author photograph). [8], 258, [6] pages. DJ has slight edge wear and soiling. Alan Furst (born 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. While attending general studies courses at Columbia University, he became acquainted with Margaret Mead, for whom he later worked. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Furst worked in advertising and wrote magazine articles, most notably for Esquire, and as a columnist for the International Herald Tribune. The year 1988 saw publication of Night Soldiersinspired by his 1984 trip to Eastern Europe on assignment for Esquirewhich invigorated his career and led to a succession of related titles. His output since 1988 includes a dozen works. He is especially noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. While all his historical espionage novels are loosely connected, only The World at Night and Red Gold share a common plot. Writing in The New York Times, the novelist Justin Cartwright says that Furst, "has adopted a European sensibility." Furst lived for many years in Paris, a city that he calls "the heart of civilization" which figures significantly in all his novels. Paris. Autumn, 1941. In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the French resistance is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: all partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines--from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet and pervasive menace as predators from the dark edge of the war--arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins--emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a producer of gangster films, now living on a few francs a day and hunted by the Gestapo. As the German occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist party. Their NKVD contact, a former Comintern operative named Weiss--his seventeenth name--begins to orchestrate a series of attacks against the Germans. Reprisals are brutal. Fear spreads through the city. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully recreates the duplicitous world of the French resistance in the worst days of World War II. Derived from a Kirkus review: More masterful, richly atmospheric WWII spy fiction sends Furst's despairing, dissolute, but delightfully resourceful film producer Jean Casson on yet another existential errand among the fiends and fanatics of the French Resistance. Having spied, loved, and lost in The World at Night, Casson is spending the cold autumn of 1941 hiding out from the Gestapo in a sleazy Paris pensione, spending his dwindling pile of Vichy francs on sex and cigarettes. Fearing that his spiteful landlady may turn him in, he pawns his overcoat, falls in with a gang of makes a fortune selling a sack of stolen sugar, and loses everything at a decadent nightclub when he's robbed and beaten by gendarmes who, instead of tossing him to the Nazis, convey him to his former intelligence commander, DeGrave, now a Vichy bureaucrat. DeGrave wants Casson to dig up a few of his left-leaning filmmaking cronies to provide liaison between a group of Vichy officers, eager to subvert the Nazi occupation, and a fanatical group of Communist terrorist fighters, whose reckless bloodlust is doing more harm than good. Casson, sunk in Gallic funk, accepts becausewell, hed rather sleep in a better hotel. The Communists, supervised by a fearsomely intelligent fatalist named Weiss, come across as a mixed bag of trembling adolescents, cocky Jews, and violent thugs. Alas, Weiss wont take Casson seriously until Casson delivers to him a thousand machine guns, with ammunition. DeGrave agrees to finance the guns, and slyly gives Casson a reason to live by introducing him to Helene Shrieber, another wounded soul who beds him, then warily permits herself to fall in love. Furst's intricate exploration of a stylishly lethal war-torn Paris never fails to fascinate. Witty, inventive, distinctively French film-noir espionage, told with the terse brutality and jaundiced romanticism of Chandler and Hammett at their peak., Random House, 1999, 3<
