The lead character, Jack, was one of those impossible men, like Indiana Jones, Dirk Pitt, Jack Ryan or James Bond. Who knew that he was for real?

Donbas is his story, the true tale of a 16 year old boy's decent into the hell of the mines in the Donbas region of the USSR. His torture, his survival, his escape and his life since then is the stuff great movies are made of. So why is Hollywood sitting on their hands on this one?

Read the adventure, then rent movies like "Moscow On The Hudson", "The Owl And The Pussycat" and "Trading Places". Watch for a big, burly man with a thick Russian accent and say hello to Jacques.

Stephen Koch's largely unheralded 1994 volume Double Lives, subtitled Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, concerns itself with a careful examination of the extensive and intricate secret propaganda campaign of the Lenin and Stalin-era Soviet Union to globalize Communism, and demonstrates how an ambitious German opportunist by the name of Willi Münzenberg successfully manipulated notable Western writers and artists into participation in this propaganda network. Koch's work answers a number of questions which have recently been brought up by conservative commentators, like Michael Medved, in discussing the role of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in so-called "Culture Wars".

Double Lives demonstrates how Willie Münzenberg, operating as a legitimate German publisher and politician, oversaw a massive media empire of newspapers, magazines, and film companies, covertly financed by the USSR, that guided Western fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers. The list of notables successfully targeted by Münzenberg and his cohorts reads like a veritable "who is who" of leftist European and American intelligentsia. Ernest Hemingway, Romaine Rolland, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Lincoln Steffens, and Bertolt Brecht were just some of the many intellectual and literary cogs in Münzenberg's propaganda and espionage machine. While some, like Andre Gide, quickly grew disillusioned and broke with the apparatus, most stayed the course preferring to gloss over the more gruesome aspects Stalin's regime in their unfailing reverence for the Communist ideal.

Koch skillfully illustrates how Stalin used the anti-Fascist movement as a cover while he and Hitler made arrangements through their respective secret services to dispose of domestic enemies. Likewise, Koch discusses at length how Münzenberg's protégé and right-hand man, a Czech Jew named Otto Katz, created, expanded, and eventually presided over an extensive espionage network that included Bloomsbury's John Strachey, the notorious Cambridge spy ring, and, in America, Whittaker Chambers and his friends Alger Hiss and Noel Field.

It would be no great exaggeration to say that the cultural history of the Western world from the 1930's on was profoundly influenced by Münzenberg's and Katz's minions and their intellectual progeny. Koch presents ample evidence that Münzenberg's agents wielded considerable influence with the Los Angeles and Hollywood cultural elites via such fronts as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. While Willie Münzenberg and Otto Katz were both eventually exterminated by the very Stalinist regime that they so faithfully and effectively served, we need not lose sight of the fact that the pro-Communist seeds that they helped sow in America during the first half of the century have by all accounts begun to beat fruit in the latter half. By successfully Stalinizing the already leftish entertainment business, while at the same time using the Hollywood allure to glamorize leftist politics, Stalin's agents prepared the groundwork for a Hollywood-led assault on traditional American 'bourgeois' values which began in earnest in the late 1960's and which has achieved critical mass over the last ten years.

This book has three different storylines, including Trotsky and space travel, and its never clear as you read through the chapters how they are related, but the plotlines are captivating. And at the end, he does a masterful job of tying it all together. Simply fascinating.

It will be hard to find this book, but if you do, definitely buy it.

Like most Burgess, this is a vastly entertaining book, but you can't just stand back and admire the architecture of this tale. Human characters dealing with super-human problems draw you in to this discussion of the uses of power and the purpose of life.

At first, the interwoven stories jar. You hurry to get back to the interrupted story. What happened next? To whom? But each story blooms, each story comments nimbly on the others and takes its own place in a masterwork by a masterwriter.

Briefly, the story concerns the encounter between two landed gentry, Eugene, who is disillusioned by his former experiences of St. Petersburg, and Tatyana, a provincial girl who sees the world through her English romance poetry. Obviously, the meeting is an ugly one. The ending is left for the reader to discover, but we all get to see how pitiful Onegin really is.

This edition includes the unfinished poem, "Onegin's Journey", and the classic "The Bronze Horseman", which is famous for describing the unstoppable and cruel will of Peter the Great in modernizing Russia.

The only problem that I had was in the English translation of "Eugene Onegin". Translating a poem from one lanaguage to another, while still maintaining proper meter and rhyme is no mean feat. Nevertheless, something is lost in the delivery of the poem and unfortunately, we can appreciate only part of Pushkin's genius by reading the English translation. I'd like to learn Russian well enough to be able to read Pushkin's poetry in order to appreciate his work more fully. Well I'm working on it!

ý am pretty sure the writer had a deep sensual feeling for tanya and was trying to put her in a role at his wife's position where she was never ever had a sexual object in his real lifetime marriage with her.

ý have seen the theatrical play of this book and enjoyed very much so as ý had the pleasure of reading it.