Duncan White's Cold Warriors is an engrossing history of the writers who wielded their pen for political ends and how their governments promoted or silenced them during the Cold War.
The war was a conflict of ideas and books were used as weapons to attack political ideologies by writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Some authors were spies while others unknowingly worked for CIA-funded publications. Writers resistant to government policy and programs were silenced, punished, imprisoned or killed.
Dense with information, the book has the impetus of a thriller filled with shocking twists and multilayered characters. The story begins with the Spanish Civil War and the disenchantment of George Orwell, spurring him to write his greatest novels. White follows the Cold Was to the end of the Berlin Wall, Glasnost, and the Prague Spring with stories like that of the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel who was found guilty of subversion and imprisoned yet became president.
I grew up seeing these writer's names on the bookshelves at the stores where I spent my allowance on paperbacks. I had no idea of their political stance or that some were spies!
- George Orwell, whose Animal Farm I bought and read as a teen
- Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon I had erringly thought was a science fiction book
- Boris Pasternak, whose Dr. Zhivago I read after seeing the movie
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books were published when I was a young adult and at one time I owned all his books in hardcover
- Graham Greene I thought was a Catholic Writer.
- Mary McCarthy's The Group was a best seller
- Stephen Spender, who signed my copy of his book of selected poems at a poetry reading
- John le Carre, pen name of David Cornwall, an M16 spy whose fictionalized spy-talk became adopted in real life
- Andrei Sinyavsky
- Richard Wright
- Ernest Hemingway
- Gioconda Belli
- Vaclav Havel,
- Joan Didion
- Isaac Babel
- Howard Fast
- Lillian Hellman
- Mikhail Sholokhov
Duncan concludes that the battle between Communism and Capitalism has morphed into a war between forms of democracy and authoritarianism and populist nationalism.
Today's writers still resist and condemn and create bring visions of the kind of country and world we must become to flourish and, very possibly, to survive. One lesson I learned from this book is that regardless of how I personally feel about a writer's ideas, the rights of freedom of speech and a free press is precious and integral to the preservation of a free society.
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| quilt by Nancy A. Bekofske |
I was given access to a free egalley by the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Cold Warriors
by Duncan White
Custom House
On Sale: 08/27/2019
List Price: 32.50 USD
ISBN: 9780062449818
ISBN 10: 0062449818
