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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning by Alex Halberstadt

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Item specifics

Condition
Good: A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including ...
Publication Date
2020-03-10
Pages
320
ISBN
9781400067060
Book Title
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union : a Memoir and a Reckoning
Item Length
9.5in
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
Publication Year
2020
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Item Height
1.1in
Author
Alex Halberstadt
Genre
Family & Relationships, Biography & Autobiography, History
Topic
Parenting / Fatherhood, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Personal Memoirs, Jewish
Item Width
6.4in
Item Weight
21 Oz
Number of Pages
320 Pages

About this product

Product Information

Can trauma be inherited? In this luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry, and reckoning, an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him. It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather--most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin--to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness, and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
ISBN-10
1400067065
ISBN-13
9781400067060
eBay Product ID (ePID)
27038735351

Product Key Features

Book Title
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union : a Memoir and a Reckoning
Author
Alex Halberstadt
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
Parenting / Fatherhood, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Personal Memoirs, Jewish
Publication Year
2020
Genre
Family & Relationships, Biography & Autobiography, History
Number of Pages
320 Pages

Dimensions

Item Length
9.5in
Item Height
1.1in
Item Width
6.4in
Item Weight
21 Oz

Additional Product Features

Lc Classification Number
Ds134.93.H35a3 2020
Reviews
"Alex Halberstadt is a magnificent writer. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a beautiful book about trauma and its impact on one extraordinary family, and an incisive, radiant look at the long legacy of suffering and war." --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City "In this urgent and enthralling reckoning with family and history, Alex Halberstadt describes the disjunction between his Soviet childhood and his American adolescence with incandescent wit, a sometimes bitter but always compelling nostalgia, and great literary flair. This book is a triumph over the shame he experienced as he was growing up, and a narrative of his struggle against steep odds to become a whole person." --Andrew Solomon, "Alex Halberstadt is a magnificent writer. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a beautiful book about trauma and its impact on one extraordinary family, and an incisive, radiant look at the long legacy of suffering and war." --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City, "One of the best accounts examining American humanitarian pursuits over the past fifty years . . . With still greater challenges on the horizon, we will need to find and empower more people like Bob Gersony--both idealistic and pragmatic--who can help make the world a more secure place." --Daniel Runde, The Washington Post "As a government official, I twice had the good fortune to meet Robert Paul Gersony, whose adventurous and consequential life is the subject of a remarkable biography by Robert Kaplan. . . Having seen firsthand how Mr. Gersony improved policy and saved lives, I am grateful that this book will make his example better known. May it become an inspiration for others." --Paul Wolfowitz, The Wall Street Journal "A book to remind us that America has been, and can be again, a force for good in the world. . . . Another important point concerns the importance of idealism in foreign policy. This is an unexpected message coming from an arch-realist such as Kaplan--and all the more powerful because of it. Time after time, he shows how doing good--curbing human rights abuses, aiding refugees, providing relief supplies--turned out to be in America's interest." --Max Boot, The Washington Post "Whether the setting is Mozambique, Chad, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, El Salvador, or Nepal, Kaplan's writing is unfailingly vivid. . . . The Good American appears at a time when U.S. intelligence agencies are under unprecedented scrutiny, and this broader import of his subject is never far from Kaplan's mind." -- The Christian Science Monitor "The book is more than just an account of one family's ordeals: it is an engrossing account of dictatorship, war and genocide, and how the toxic legacy they left behind has etched itself into successive generations of Soviet citizens." --The Guardian "A deeply personal book, an engaging and subtle piece of nonfiction that's full of history and [Halberstadt's] own wit." --The Paris Review "Alex Halberstadt's Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a rich bone broth of flavors. . . . Part memoir, part journalistic foray, part historical investigation, part sociopolitical analysis, Young Heroes plumbs all-too-relevant modern Russian history through the lens of Halberstadt's family history, written in Halberstadt's trademark compelling style." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "It's the unexpected specificity of Halberstadt's observations that ultimately make this memoir as lush and moving as it is." --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times "Not in my most hopeful imaginings could that book have turned out to be as surprising, sad, funny, and engrossing as the one he wrote. This is history as memoir, and vice versa." --John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead, "In this urgent and enthralling reckoning with family and history, Alex Halberstadt describes the disjunction between his Soviet childhood and his American adolescence with incandescent wit, a sometimes bitter but always compelling nostalgia, and great literary flair. This book is a triumph over the shame he experienced as he was growing up, and a narrative of his struggle against steep odds to become a whole person." --Andrew Solomon "As a boy, the author of this haunting book immigrated to the United States, changed his name, and turned his back on his Soviet past. As a man, he reclaimed it, wrestled with it, and ultimately faced it head-on. The result is an exploration of family and memory that stayed with me long after I turned the last beautifully written page." --Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter "I remember being in a bar with Alex Halberstadt almost twenty years ago, talking about our families, when he said, 'Did I ever tell you my grandfather was Stalin's bodyguard?' He hadn't. I suggested that he write a book about it. Not in my most hopeful imaginings could that book have turned out to be as surprising, sad, funny, and engrossing as the one he wrote. This is history as memoir, and vice versa. Describing Russia in the twentieth century as a place where 'the buffer between history and biography became nearly imperceptible,' he made me feel how this is true of all places, for all of us." --John Jeremiah Sullivan "Alex Halberstadt is a magnificent writer. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a beautiful book about trauma and its impact on one extraordinary family, and an incisive, radiant look at the long legacy of suffering and war." --Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City "Alex Halberstadt writes honestly and movingly about what is inescapable in a family, the toll pain inflicts on the ones we love, and how that pain echoes across generations. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is many things--including a history of twentieth-century Russia and an immigrant story--but at heart, it's a coming-of-age story in which wisdom is attained through forgiveness and compassion." --David Bezmozgis, author of The Betrayers
Copyright Date
2020
Target Audience
Trade
Lccn
2019-019658
Illustrated
Yes

Item description from the seller

AlibrisBooks

AlibrisBooks

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All around had the best experience you could hope for with purchasing online. Seller was informative of the shipping process from start to finish. Product arrived matching the specifications I requested but also matched the photographs and item description. Lastly shipped and arrived fast and packaged perfectly for safety. Highly suggest this sellers shop, AAA+++.

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