Peters does it again. A magnificent combination of strong characters and geopolitical reality and a fine primer on the political importance of Uzbekistan that was written nearly a decade before 9/11.

This book may be in the wrong category. I would not really place it in the action group becuase it is a display of a deep character driven novel. It is really a very interesting look at this difficult time for Russian's. It was also much more enjoyable then I thought it would be. The descriptions of the locations and main home were very good. I also liked the characters that were created. They had depth and feeling, not just scratch the surface to fill pages. The book is not the feel good hit of the year, it does had a rich plot that you need to keep up with, but the author rewards your efforts with a masterly written book. I think when it comes down to it that is the strength here, the writing is just very good, a lot of feeling comes out.

The prologue. Ralph Peters gives you the perspective, the eyesight, of a Soviet Third Shock Army officer stationed in East Germany, 1989. Inside the Magdeberg headquarters, you drink vodka with the Russion generals. You smell the stink of their fear-sweat. You hear their outrage and lack of understanding as the East Germans protest down the streets against them. Against you.

Ralph Peters gets you so close to them, you not only feel the scratchy wool of their uniforms, but when word comes that the locals are tearing down the Berlin Wall... it hits you with the same end-of-the-world kidney punch as it must have hit real-life Soviet officers.

And that's just the first few pages. Next up, we have exotic locals, both hot and cold, intrigue, plots, Islamic terror, and some of the hottest (...romance) to ever land on the pages of a hardcover novel.

Plus the usual heaping dose Ralph Peters of tragedy.

Beg, borrow, buy, or steal this book.

Having read several books on the move to EMU, this is definitely one of the most thoughtful and incisive (and by far the best written!!). Clearly the French perspective on the EMS and EMU is absolutely crucial to understanding why European monetary integration happened at all. Well done! This book enters into impressive detail about the French perspective but places the development of French policy clearly in the context of wider European developments so that the non-specialist can follow the text and learn about monetary integration more generally.

This is a well-balanced, thoughtful study of French policy on European monetary integration. For those looking to understand EMU go no further!

This is a detailed yet highly readable account of the reasons why the French sought European monetary integration. I recommend it all those interested in why the French embraced EMU.

Vishnevskaya's reputation for forthrightness AND the sub-title she chooses here --A Russian Story-- indicate strong intentions for this book. Not 'MY Russian Story', but 'A Russian Story', because Galina Vishnevskaya tells an epic Russian story, honoring with a severe truth the Russia of sorrows of which her story forms but a unique part. This is no prima donna's idle tableau of a curtained career. Vishnevskaya's art comes of suffering, & she doesn't head down that road. She divulges her art generously, but her attitude never self serves. Her aim is always higher - she's interested to say not only what HAPPENED in Soviet life, but what WAS. and WHO!--- Vishnevskaya regularly excoriates with galvinizing abandon the soviet lackeys with whom she had to deal! She names names and motives, because it's the damned truth! The West in general and artists in particular owe a huge debt to Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya for the willing sacrifice of themselves in exile for the simple truth. Rostropovich garners the commentary in the West with the cello & conducting, but Galina is the heart of genius, and THAT seems the telling component in this book. Her depiction of Solzhenitsyn is heartrending, and stands as the book's axis; everything leads to it, and derives from it. Her friendship with Shostakovich, her brilliant feelings toward him-- an almost daughterly reverence informed by the highest artistic aesthetic. It's also through the part Shostakovich played in her life that we meet a musically learned Galina as well. She was a musician FIRST, singer second. How rare and wonderful - no wonder Slava fell in love! Galina dances with the shadows of Shostakovich throughout, & it's one of the book's endearing aspects. There are wonderful stories too of Britten and his music, & a surprisingly frank exposition of Furtseva, soviet Minister of Culture, whose enigmatic machinations both helped and ill-served Galina more than once. Vishnevskaya can sing AND write! The book ends when you don't want it to, leaving Russia... it's ultimately a love story -- Galina and Russia. Maybe she'll yet write her American story.

Galina, né Pavlova, has many interesting stories to tell about her remarkable life: as a baby abandoned by her parents, an army officier and a polish/gypsy mother, she was raised by her paternal grandmother. Galina overcame so many difficulties in her life, surviving the blockade of Leningrad during the war and so many hardships such as tuberculosis and starvation. Unlike so many singers' biographies, this intelligent artist shares more than anecdotes about the opera world and her many successes in the theatre. She speaks of her personal friendships with people such as composer Shostakovich her neighbor, scientist Andrei Sakarov, also a neighbor, and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a live-in guest in her dacha. There is much commentary written with not a little bitterness about the Soviet authorities who so often thwarted her career and blocked free expression in the arts within the Soviet country and in other countries where she was invited to perform. She writes very well and with much insight into philosophy, human relations, personalities, etc. I found the book very absorbing and hard to put down. Her close friendship with British composer Benjamin Britten also yields many stories of their memorable times together both at Aldeburgh and on vacation in Armenia and Russia. Her remarkable and at times stormy marriage to cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, her third husband, brought about big changes in her life, and their mutual courage and boldness to stand up for freedom against the Soviet regime cost them their citizenship.

"...We were actors in real life and human beings on the stage."

Thus spake Galina Vishnevskaya, in interviews she and her husband, Mstislav ("Slava") Rostropovich, gave in Paris in 1983, captured in a companion book ("Russia, Music, and Liberty: Conversations with Claude Samuel.") to this one. The quotation barely begins to suggest the Kafkaesque world in which they lived, when they were musical artists of the highest order in the Soviet Union.

Vishnevskaya was a "prima donna assoluta" at the Bolshoi Opera during her prime, arguably the finest Russian soprano of all time. And, as her prime overlapped those of Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, one can only wonder what her international reputation might have been had her career been entirely in the west; the first two-thirds (and best) part of it was largely away from the gaze of the international music community.

This is, as she subtitles it, her "Russian story" covering her life up to the final hours in 1976 when she left the Soviet Union, eventually (two years later) as an exile. And it almost ended before it ever started.

Born in poverty to parents who abandoned her to her grandmother, she possessed an incredible voice as a child. Largely self-taught, and then - at age sixteen - improperly taught - she didn't learn proper voice technique until after she had established a beginning career in operetta. Then she contracted TB, and the doctor caring for her offered that the only cure - which she refused - was to collapse the infected lung. It was only by mortgaging her future singing fees for black-market purchase of scarce antibiotics that she recovered.

In 1952, in her mid-twenties, she auditioned for the youth group of the Bolshoi Opera Theater, was instantly accepted, underwent a meteoric rise through the Bolshoi ranks on her voice and talent, and soon became the prima diva of the troupe. In 1955, she met Rostropovich, whose courting of her is one of the few lighthearted sections of an otherwise chilling tale of intrigue, deception and lies in the intelligentsia circles in which the pair of them existed and performed.

The next two decades (1955 - 1975) of this journal focus largely on one person, and the special relationship that they had with him: Dmitri Shostakovich. As artists, it was only natural that their paths would cross and thereafter, for the rest of Shostakovich's life, intertwine. But this was more than acquaintanceship; it was friendship based on trust during Shostakovich's years when it was virtually impossible for him to trust anyone. And Vishnevskaya defended that trust with the ferocity of a tiger. One anecdote of her ferocity will suffice as an example.

In the early 1960's, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was well-published in "accepted" Soviet literature journals despite his "rebelliousness." His famous poem, "Babi Yar" (1961) about the German slaughter of Ukranian Jews during WW II, gained overnight success, and Shostakovich, moved by the poem's message, placed it at the core of his Thirteenth Symphony with Yevtushenko's warm agreement. The work received its Russian premiere "as is" on December 18, 1962, and was tumultuously received by the audience but not by officials of the state, who read into it a message of Russian complicity in the matter of anti-Semitism, a subtext of Yevtushenko's that was undoubtedly accurate, as he revised the text shortly after the premiere without consulting Shostakovich. Some years later, in London where Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich met up with Yevtushenko, Vishnevskaya gave Yevtushenko a tongue-lashing over his "revisionism" that runs several pages.

In an act of supreme political courage involving another Russian writer, Rostropovich provided refuge, for four years in the early '70's, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writings on conditions in the Soviet Union were officially banned. Solzhenitsyn subsequently went into political exile, but this act of courage was to have its effect on the careers of Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich, particularly the latter, who for all intents and purposes had his abilities to perform and conduct stripped away from him. Only by "pulling in markers" were the two of them able to secure permission from Brezhnev to go abroad on a two-year "artistic leave."

"Galina" ends on a note of uncertainty and apprehension, as Vishnevskaya, in 1976, boards a plane with her two daughters to join Rostropovich in the West, eventually (1978) in exile when their citizenship was revoked for the Solzhenitsyn matter. But this is merely the end of her "first" Russian life and the beginning of another, more international, one. Her own career as a diva continued for nearly another decade; Rostropovich went on to become an internationally-known conductor while continuing his career as a preeminent cellist; with "perestroika," they made an historic return to Moscow in 1990 (after Gorbachev restored their citizenship), at which Rostropovich conducted what is to me the finest performance of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony (immortalized on a Sony CD that also included Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" and William Schuman's orchestral arrangement of Charles Ives's "Variations on America").

Nowadays Vishnevskaya loves to brag about her six thoroughly-Americanized grandchildren. They oversee the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Foundation, a charity for immunizing Russian children against disease. She recently founded the Galina Vishnevskaya School of Opera in Moscow, for providing master classes to promising young artists. All in all, a rather remarkable "follow-up" for this peripatetic pair of seemingly perpetually-young 75-year-olds.

But the clock cannot be turned back. "Galina" serves as a gripping reminder of how things were over the fifty years that the two of them spent in the Soviet Union. And, at least as important for me, it serves as one of the most honest and accurate appraisals of Dmitri Shostakovich the person as one is likely to find, from one who knew and loved him as a true friend.

Even in a totalitarian society, supreme artistry can sometimes carry clout. For Vishnevskaya (and Rostropovich), there was enough clout - barely - to get out and "live to tell about it." Thankfully.

In 1877 the great robber barons of steel and rail-Vanderbilt, Fisk, Gould, and others-appeared to have consolidated their rule over land and labor in the post-Civil War period. In their quest for infinitely expanding wealth, they subjected the workers under their command to ever-increasing demands for more work and reduced their wages time and again to below starvation levels. As thousands were laid off in the economic downturn of the 1870s, protests developed among the workers, and police were mobilized to quell the disturbances.
It was not the greed and brutality of the capitalist overlords that provoked a mass rebellion. It was that they made life virtually impossible for the working people. The great strike was centered in rail and began in the summer of 1877 in response to yet another wage cut.
A group of bold rail workers in West Virginia walked off the job. With no union, no organization, and nothing but a desperate urge to reclaim their humanity, their initiative spread like wildfire to thousands of other rail workers from Baltimore to St. Louis in a rolling surge of strikes, mass mobilizations and confrontations with the armed minions of capital. Ultimately general strikes of all workers were precipitated in St. Louis, San Francisco and other cities.
The rail barons sought to put down the uprising with military force, mobilizing state militias, police and national guard troops, firing into the crowds, killing dozens. For them it was only a question of forcing the masses to do their bidding. They believed that they were the rulers, the workers were there to serve them.
This great labor battle awakened the true spirit of liberty and solidarity among the laboring masses. In their struggle against the tyranny of capital they became the one true embodiment of democracy and the only hope of progress for toiling humanity. They laid the foundation stone for the worker's movement in the U.S. It gave a huge impetus to the organization of labor unions as well as the beginnings of labor political action: the formation of a workers party.
Reading this book brings home the reality of the class struggle in the U.S. and helps us to understand how and why it developed as it did. It also helps us understand why this class struggle won't go away as long as capitalism exists. It helps us to appreciate the organized struggle of the workers as the only way forward for humanity in its quest for a truly livable planet.

1877: the naked face of capitalism in America. In the midst of a deep-going economic depression, bosses imposed massive layoffs and deep pay cuts, and workers responded. From Chicago to St. Louis to New York to Philadelphia, rail workers, iron workers, carpenters, meatpackers and others launched a wave of massive strikes and street protests. The bosses and their government mobilized all their forces against the workers: courts, the press, police, the national guard and federal troops. While the workers were eventually beaten in these battles, the lessons learned helped forge political class consciousness and lay the basis for further struggles.

Foner's book is an exciting history of these days. He quotes extensively from labor and capitalist press of the day, from speeches and declarations by workers' leaders, and from government reports and documents to give a real feel of the roots of the uprising and the conflicting interests that lay behind it. I particularly found useful the description of what different workers leaders did at the time-- from conservative trade union presidents to militant socialists. Also the challenge and experiences of native-born and immigrant workers fighting together against their common exploiters. There is a lot to learn from this book today!

While this book gives a rich detail of the day-to-day struggles in 1877, two others will help get a broader perspective on the key issues political posed: American Labor Struggles 1877-1934, by Samuel Yellen, and Revolutionary Continuity, Marxist Leadership in the U.S. 1948-1917, by Farrell Dobbs.

The great labor uprising of 1877 started when a strike by rail workers swept across the country and was joined by many thousand, including the unemployed. What this book clearly shows is how interconnected U.S. workers were-how mutually affected by economic disaster-and how willing to embark on massive and militant resistance. Are workers that different today? Are today's bosses-as they push for wage concessions and bailouts--that much different from the rail bosses of 1877? This book makes you think more seriously about the great events that could quickly develop out of today's economic downturn.

This is a beautifully touching book that takes a glimpse into the lives of people impacted by and living through Europe during the war and the following decades. It covers the lives of many people in Germany, Hungary, etc. in a way that makes you truly appreciate the impact to people's lives and sense of identity. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this period of time.

I don't know if the author Kaufman is Jewish or not, but his account appears not to be opinionated, biased, judgmental, or one-sided, but gains its strength through the characters or the situation "talking," rather than the author explaining things as Goldhagen tried to do in Hitler's Willing Executioners. I had read quite a few books on the Holocaust and wondered what happened after the war. Kaufman answers this question clearly and to the point, and for this I give him five stars. - As for the book's readability, as noted in previous reviews, the narrative introduces us to several Jewish families in different East European countries, and lets us "follow them" closely from the war's end to after the Berlin Wall fell. The result is quite good and, at the same time, very surprising and unexpected, at least to me; the characters are alive and real and they and their histories will remain in the reader's memory for some time. - Overall, I think Kaufman did an excellent job in answering my question as to what happened to the European Jews after the war. I was impressed.

Inspiring fascinating journey into the "heart of the world," former communist block countries where Jews are coming out of the woodwork. Kaufman does a fabulous job tracking down some amazing people and telling stories which need to be told. I've recomended this book to all of my friends. None of them has bothered to read it and frankly I'm sorry for them because reading this book is a life enriching experience. Three cheers for Kaufman

This book is the most important description of the soviet terror that stroke the whole society in communist countries much before Soljenistin. When published, all communist parties in Europe, continued to refuse to see the horrible reality for decades, showing that communism equal nazism. This book should be reprinted and advertised as a piece of XX century History

This book is probably the best book written about the extremes to which a government can systematically abuse it citizens, and how one individual can live through the horror and document the story first hand. Takes place in Stalinist Russia, but the back drop could be any totalitarian regime.

I was given this book to read by someone who escaped the "workers' paradise" in Europe. For those who underestimate the evil of the Communist Party, you will quickly be awakened.

I chose this title, because it was true, at least for me. As Americans, we (some of us, not all) "think" Russians are not "very intelligent", "backward" and even, "less than human."
After reading this book, I tend to "get on my soapbox" to help people understand what few choices, the Russian people ever had in the outcomes of their lives! I never knew this before purchasing and reading Mr. Lincoln's book!
If you cannot be convinced by the poverty imposed on the Russians through Mr. Lincoln's words, you will be convinced by the heart-wrenching photographs; the children who appear as hopeless, hovels designed as homes with animals living within, death from starvation was not uncommon. And all the time, Russia refused (those in power prior to the Revolution)to feed her people, wheat was being shipped to other European countries.
And the Russians never questioned the motives of the Tsar; after the Revolution, they still starved and were murdered by Stalin and Hitler.
We need to change our attitudes and this book did it for me.

In the forward, W. Bruce Lincoln states the book is "...an effort to explore the lives, thoughts, hopes, and dreams of the men and women who lived in the world's largest empire and to convey some sense of the tensions that tore at the fabric of their existence on the eve of the Great War and the Revolution of 1917." In this effort he succeeds brilliantly.

We see portraits of Tsar Alexander III, Nicholas II, Pobedonostsev, Lenin, Rasputin, and a host of other generals, officials and ordinary people who shaped that era.

We get an insider's look at what life was like in a peasant community, inside the peasant's izba or house, and their attitudes towards schooling, medicine and religion. We go inside the growing factories and the slums the workers inhabited in the cities with rapidly developing industry. We see the new nobility of the industrial barons, the revolutionaries fighting the tsarist autocracy, the defenders of the Old Order...all come to life in these pages.

Graphic descriptions are given of the vicious pogroms against Jews. The impact of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in both economic and a political aspects is covered. The 1904 war with Japan is there with its criminally incompetent generals and and admirals and the war's impact on the development of the Revolution of 1905 as well as the mood of the populace as the nations slides toward the Great War.

This well written, illuminating, detailed and well documented book is a classic work on the Russian society of those years and fleshes out the soul of Russia as few other books do. 16 pages of photos. Highly recommended.

The book I ordered, In War's Dark Shadow, was exactly as the seller described it - in perfect condition. Since the book is not longer in print, I feel lucky to find one that looks as if it has never been used. The book was shipped promptly, and the seller was a pleasure to work with. I highly recommend this seller!

thanks!

Fight in the Fields - without a doubt, a story worthy of a thousand books. This book is simply a comprehensive history of the UFW. The struggle and the suffering must never be forgotten and continue today. A fantastic account of a imensely important movement.

Okay, I'm biased. I'm the author of a mystery novel in current release that features a Latino private investigator as the protagonist, and I've been teaching in a rural California high school with a student population over 98% Hispanic for over twenty years. This biography, loaded with photographs and facts, is perfect for today. It clearly proves what an exceptional man Cesar Chavez was and what exceptional accomplishments that man achieved. If you have any interest in the real America, you have to read this book.

This very personal history of the Cesar Chavez and the UFW is a comprehensive account of the farmworkers movement and the difficulties encountered in their fight for justice and fair treatment. Very well written and illustrated.

I didn't care about the red herrings the investigators were following. I just wanted to know what Boyce was really doing. So I read only those parts of the book. Those parts were quite interesting.

I picked this book up in a used book store, and read it in less than a day. I couldnot put it down! At first, I almost felt sorry for Christopher Boyce, but once he started robbing banks to support himself, forget about it. I wonder if today, in July of 2000, if he is still as bitter towards both the government and the CIA

Great! I am 15 and have just discovered this great book. My mother had owned it it was about my uncle Duke Smith. Duke his nick name. the book was great a must to read.

This book has helped me in many situations, dealing with the company I work for, and as a Union Steward, I have been able to help with attendance and leaves of absence issues.
This book is very user friendly, and the many examples,makes the FMLA laws very clear.

I am a Diabetic and had no idea that I would get leave for my chronic condition. Thanks to this handbook, which explains everything clearly, how to utilize this law. My company has for years violated peoples rights pertaining to FMLA. Now I can confront the company and the union on how to proceed on leave matters. Thanks To Mr. Schwartz for writing this book and Pres. Clinton (democrat controlled Congress) for passing this law!

Finally, a book written with clarity regarding the FMLA law and Union represented companies. I highly recommend this book.