Parting With Illusions - Hardcover

Although readers will find the book deeply involving, ultimately they will wonder at its point: Memoir? Polemic? Apologia? As autobiographer, the Russian TV commentator is disappointingly reticent. Albeit revealing of his privileged early years in Paris and Manhattan with his Russian father, a Marxist, and French mother, the family's move to East Berlin in 1948 when he was 15 and their emigration to Moscow in 1953, Pozner insufficiently discloses his later life in the nomenklatura. Often the polemicist intercepts the diarist to castigate Americans for disregarding their principles of equality, but one can't take seriously Pozner's lectures on racism when he presents himself as a model of rectitude and offers as evidence his "love" for the black maid of his childhood. He is opinionated about the Soviet leadership back to Stalin, yet, perhaps wisely, checks his gait when traversing today's boggy ground, although he strongly supports glasnost. The book does not read as if Pozner were seeking an imprimatur from the General Secretary, however; his sincerity and humanism are convincing--but Pozner shows himself to be less knowing about Americans than he thinks. Author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pozner, a Soviet TV commentator perhaps best known for cohosting (with Phil Donahue) a televised U.S./Soviet "public meeting," is what the American Right fears most--a charming, erudite member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who speaks with a strong American accent. In this book, Pozner explains how he came to be who he is, taking the reader from his birth in German-occupied Paris to his formative years in New York City in the 1950s at the beginning of the Red Scare, to his arrival in the Soviet Union during the final years of Stalin. Interspersed throughout are remarks on the American and Soviet political systems. He has praise and criticism for each, though his heart belongs to Moscow. An important and occasionally moving book.
- Kim H. Tunnicliff, Albion Coll., Mich.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.