The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June."

What a wonderful way to begin the second half of 2021! John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021) is the best book I have read this year so far, and only my second five-star rating in six months. The book is a collection of 46 short essays on various manifestations of human life and human culture. (In a gimmick that will sound familiar for us Goodreads members, the author provides a rating for each such anthropocene manifestation on a five-star scale.)

Anthropocene is usually defined as "the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment." Yet, the book is not really focused on human influence on the environment. Yes, the author makes it clear that the human race has been succeeding in its job of destroying the planet, but this is not his main point. I love the book so much because he shows that despite all the infinite and perpetual human suffering - pain, disease, pandemics, failure, fear, loneliness, and eventual death - life is beautiful and the world is beautiful. We just need to look carefully.

Being a "word person" as opposed to an "image person" (to me, one right word is often worth a thousand images; and in most cases I care more how the authors write than what they write about), I admire John Green's prose. In the unforgettable essay Sunsets, he defends the appreciation of "the clichéd beauty of an ostentatious sunset":

"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, [...] And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself [...] It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunset five stars."

In one of the most moving essays, Auld Lang Syne, where the author mentions the death of his friend, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the reader will find the following passage of evocative prose:

"And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past -- seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them -- and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."

This is not to say that it is just the writing that I admire in Anthropocene; in all the essays there is so much wisdom about life and about being human. Lascaux Cave Paintings is, to me, the best essay in the collection. The author writes about Palaeolithic paintings made by people who lived about 17,000 years ago. Some of the paintings are the so-called "negative hand stencils" that all kids produce at some point of their childhood. John Green writes:

"[...] the hand stencils say, 'I was here.' They say, 'You are not new.'"

While the members of each human generation - the Boomers like myself, the Millennials like my daughter, or Gen Alpha like my grandkids - want to think that they and their times are unique in history, we all are really the same, and the Lascaux Cave artists are our great-great-... repeat about 600 times... -great-great-grandparents. We are human, we live, we love, and we die.

There is so much more in the collection! Great Gatsby, velociraptors, scratch 'n' sniff stickers, air conditioning, Jerzy Dudek - the Polish goalkeeper of Liverpool F.C., Doi's circle drawings, and more and more. And there is even laugh-out-loud humor:

"I don't labor under the delusion that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world's largest balls."

This is a book full of beautiful prose, sweetness, and love of life and of the world. I guess the only way to enhance the reading experience would be to listen to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World while reading.

I would like to thank my outstanding former student for giving me this book as a birthday gift.

Five stars.

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Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"William Taubman's monumental, long-awaited biography of Nikita Khrushchev is the most important book on Khrushchev to appear in English since the deposed Soviet leader's own memoirs in 1970. It is rich in analysis and factual detail, shedding new light both on Khrushchev's life and on the Soviet state."
- Robert Cottrell, New York Review of Books

A personal reflection: Khrushchev was the first politician whom I remember from childhood. Until the 1990s, Poland was in the Soviet sphere of influence so the Soviet party leaders were bigger than God for us, the Polish children. I remember one night in October 1964 when my mother woke me up saying "No more Khrushchev!" and it was like the end of the world. I remember exactly how the room looked from my bed when I heard the news.

This is the eleventh book on Russian and Soviet leaders that I am reviewing here on Goodreads. The full list is included below the rating. Also, it is the second biography of Nikita Khrushchev that I am reviewing, and a very different one from Medvedev's work. I completely agree with the sentiment expressed by the professional reviewer and quoted in the epigraph. Let me steal yet another blurb, this time from Simon Heffer in The Spectator:

"A monumental book....A masterpiece, magnificently researched and well written, bringing out the true dimensions of his subject"

Note the use of the word "monumental" by both reviewers. Yes, that's indeed the best adjective to describe of William Taubman's Khrushchev. The Man and His Era. (2003) Not only is the biography monumental - in size, scope, and depth of detail - but it also is "definitive," in the sense that it will be next to impossible to improve upon. When reading the bio one is overwhelmed by the breathtaking thoroughness and completeness - almost as if every month of Khrushchev's life and every aspect of his activities has been meticulously documented. Note the volume of the book: 651 pages, plus over 200 (!!!) pages of notes, bibliography, and index.

Not being a historian, political scientist, or a writer, I am not qualified to properly review a superb biography. I will just offer a few comments on some of the fragments of the bio that made the strongest impression on me.

Khrushchev (three years younger than my grandmother) spent his youth in rural Russia, in extremely primitive living conditions, which would be unimaginable for most modern people. Not only poverty - which is ubiquitous today even in the richest countries - but also famine and hunger-driven cannibalism. Add to this the extreme political persecution - extreme as in never-ending mass killings of so-called political enemies. If anything seems more shocking than eating other people to survive, it is having to sentence other people to death in order not be sentenced to death. The passages about Khrushchev, a young activist rising in the ranks of the Communist party, calling for executions of "enemies of the party and nation" during Stalin's purges are extremely hard to read.

Soon after the purges comes World War Two and the blood-curdling stupidity of Stalin, the "Greatest Genius of All Times and Nations," which cost millions of people their lives. When the mass-murdering tyrant finally dies in 1953, Khrushchev gradually grabs the power. The author's detailed explanations about why it was Khrushchev who won the succession power struggle are fascinating. In particular, I have been captivated by the detailed discussion of the so-called "anti-Beria plot," with its double twist.

Khrushchev's famous "Secret Speech" on February 25, 1956, when he began disclosing the unimaginably huge extent of Stalin's crimes against humanity and, in particular, against his nation, was the beginning of the great ideological thaw that stopped the avalanche of political killings and brutal persecution in Eastern Europe (naturally, the persecution remained unabated as it is one of the essences of human nature, but became less lethal).

In a particularly depressing fragment of the book the author writes about the people's of Soviet Georgia unyielding love for their Greatest Son, Stalin, who - despite that the Greatest Son spilled more Georgian blood than that of any other region - "carried flowers to the Stalin monument" during protests against Khrushchev's Secret Speech; twenty people died during protests against sullying Stalin's immortal name.

The Berlin Crisis of 1961: Thanks to reading Mr. Taubman's work I feel as if I finally understand the exact dynamics of the political events of that year, although I acutely remember the concern and nervousness of the Polish radio broadcasts 60 years ago. Almost immediately after this, the Cuban missiles crisis happens, when the world gets the closest to being destroyed in a global nuclear war. I have read about the crisis in several other books, yet Mr. Taubman offers new insights and details, especially on the bumbling execution of the Soviet plan to bring nuclear missiles to Cuba.

The Cuban crisis was one of the major factors in the unraveling of Khrushchev's political leadership. The author describes the events preceding and surrounding Khrushchev's ouster in October of 1964 with great clarity. Finally, in a harrowing passage, we read what the deposed Soviet leader regretted about his life:

"'Most of all the blood [...] My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.'"

It is a strong indictment of the failure of human race that Mr. Khrushchev, despite being instrumental in his youth in executing hundreds of people for fictitious political crimes in order to save his own life, undoubtedly deserves credit and praise for greatly contributing to ending Stalin's brutal reign. Mr. Khrushchev had laid the foundations for future reforms by Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Reading about humanity's lukewarm response toward Stalin's crimes makes one notice how constant the human nature is. Millions of people in ex-Soviet Union still cherish Stalin's memory. I know of another country where tens and tens of millions of people have voted for an utterly incompetent, corrupt, and failed politician.

Four-and-a-half stars.

My previous reviews of books on Soviet leaders:

Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure - by Robert G. Kaiser

The Struggle for Russia - by Boris Yeltsin

Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin - by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson

The Andropov File - by Martin Ebon

Against the Grain - An Autobiography - by Boris Yeltsin

Lenin to Gorbachev: Three generations of Soviet Communists

Brezhnev, Soviet Politician - by Murphy

Khrushchev - by Roy Medvedev

Gorbachev and His Revolution - by Mark Galeotti

Andropov - by Zhores Medvedev

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