Delirio em S.Mamede

Algumas imagens do filme inspirado no livro que ando a ler

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Este livro, é a minha mais recente paixão. Comprei-o por 1cent novo na Amazon. Dos melhores que já li e dos mais esclarecidos. Para alguem sem jeito para palavras, deixo aqui o artigo do N.Y.Times



THERE are literally hundreds of books about Stalin, the dictator who for a quarter of a century tyrannized the Soviet Union and kept much of the world on tenterhooks. But because his private life was so closely shielded, the vast bulk of this material concentrated on his domestic and foreign policies rather than on his person. As a consequence, his image was blurred: an immensely powerful historic figure, he remained incomprehensible as a human being, a distant and shadowy apparition, a demigod.

''Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar,'' by the British journalist and novelist Simon Sebag Montefiore, reverses this approach: it pays minimal attention to Stalin's politics and concentrates on the man and his immediate associates. This was made possible by the author's access to previously secret private documents, including Stalin's notes and messages, as well as by interviews with the surviving offspring of his closest companions. In addition, Montefiore has made an exhaustive study of the published literature. The result is the first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler and yet, according to opinion polls, is regarded by Russians even today as a giant, the fourth greatest human being in world history.



The picture that emerges from ''Stalin'' is both disturbing and perplexing. In the early chapters of Montefiore's narrative Stalin is already the unchallenged ruler of the Soviet Union, surrounded by toadies ready to carry out his every whim. His youth and rise to power are disposed of in a mere 12 pages. Barely mentioned are the industrialization program, which drove Soviet living standards to unparalleled lows, or collectivization, which re-enserfed Russian peasants, causing millions of deaths from starvation.

What we do learn is that Stalin had an unexpected human side to his personality. He could sentence thousands of innocent people to death with a stroke of the pen and then go to his private cinema to enjoy an American cowboy movie, yet he could also display affection and tenderness. The book opens with a prologue describing the suicide of his wife in 1932, a tragedy that, according to Montefiore, shattered him for life. There are numerous examples of Stalin's affection for his children and friends of his youth. And he looked after his associates, making sure they took good care of themselves. Once, when Artyom Mikoyan, designer of the MIG aircraft, ''suffered angina and was put to bed, he was aware of someone coming into his room and tenderly laying a blanket over him. He was amazed to see it was Stalin.''



These manifestations of humanity are supplemented with evidence that Stalin had intellectual aspirations. He displayed a passionate interest in history; at the height of World War II he spent his spare time reading about ancient Greece. After the war, as he was about to leave on vacation, he ordered a library of books that included volumes of Shakespeare, Herzen, Goethe's letters, ''Poetry of the French Revolution'' and a history of the Seven Years' War.

How to reconcile such manifestations of humanity and intellectualism with the persistent sadism, clinical paranoia and debauchery that fill so many of the pages of this book? For life at Stalin's court was a kind of Grand Guignol, dominated by the unpredictable and irrational behavior of the leader -- with his ''swarthy pock-marked face, gray hair, broken stained teeth and yellow Oriental eyes'' -- who kept his entourage in constant dread of his outbursts. People were expelled from his presence for no apparent reason, sometimes simply demoted, sometimes arrested and tortured. In 1937 he had the Politburo formally authorize physical torture of ''enemies of the people,'' and he would add the words ''Beat, beat!'' next to a victim's name.



His cronies learned to anticipate his moods in diverse ways, even from gestures he made with his pipe: ''Stalin was always pacing up and down. There were various warning signals of a black temper: if the pipe was unlit, it was a bad omen. If Stalin put it down, an explosion was imminent. Yet if he stroked his mustache with the mouthpiece of the pipe, this meant he was pleased.''

Richard Pipes is a professor emeritus of history at Harvard and the author, most recently, of ''Vixi: The Memoirs of a Non-Belonger.''

The I.R.A. - Tim Pat Coogan

Hoje veio no correio mais uma coisa para mim. Um livro, pena que já tenha começado a ler o que ontem aqui referi, ficando este em nº1 na lista de espera.

Vi esta critica na Amazon, e parece-me fiel:

this book is truly the standard reference on the IRA and thier history, it shows how the provisional IRA has changed from simple revolutionaries to highly trained ruthless terrorists who commited many attrocities while also fighting for catholic rights and ultimately realizing that they could not be beaten, but also could not win through violence alone. shows the political savy of sinn fein and the only semi-succesfull attempt by protestent paramilitaries to counter the ruthlessness of the IRA and INLA. tim pat coogen is one of the best authors on the subject of northern ireland. easily surpassess the somewhat biased and not very accurate account of the last twenty five years of the conflict by Bowyer Bell in his revised book IRA the secret army

The Order Of The Death’s Head

Na ressaca do livro Hell’s Angels, do Hunter, vou voltar ao meu estudo sobre uma época fascinante da nossa história. Aquele que comecei a ler ontem chama-se The Order Of The Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. Obrigado Amazon.co.uk.


By Konrad Baumeister

Hoehne's book on the SS is the most complete, authoritative, and interesting I have read on the subject. There is nothing in the formation, administration, directing and eventual destruction of the SS that is not addressed, and much is covered here which is simply never dealt with elsewhere.

From the start, Hitler had to contend with the various power blocs in his government. He had devised a system which his various paladins would have to jockey and maneuver for relative favor, which generally allowed Hitler greater room for maneuver and control, but which also at times forced unpleasant meetings and compromise. Himmler's SS was quite often at the center of these power struggles, as its grasp grew more and more ambitious and it conflicted with first the SA at home, then the foreign service abroad, and finally the Wehrmacht in the conduct of the war. The SS won some of these; they lost some, too. The bureaucratic struggles throughout Nazi Germany take up quite a large part of the book; they did not end until Nazi Germany itself did. Nazi rule was self-contradictory, anarchic and without structure; anything but the planned and directed political order it is usually alleged to have been.

As late as 1932 Hitler's position in the party and the nation was often in doubt. The 1934 Roehm Putsch, in which Hitler of all the top Nazis looks least duplicitous and may well have been maneuvered into against his wishes, is presented almost minute by minute. It is one episode among many which are treated definitively by Hoehne; others include the evolution of the racial policy, of the death camps - their planning, design, implementation and abandonment - of the peace feelers made to the west by Schellenberg of the SD and others; it contains a wealth of fascinating information.



Himmler's own grip on his institution was incomplete. Not only was he far from omnipotent even at the height of his power, his personal influence waned as the SS itself as a power center waxed. The smaller pre-war SS could be guided politically, seeded racially, and its leadership trained personally; as the organization expanded into eventually every single sphere of German life, Himmler's own control could not keep up. Much as Hitler was left as the broker of last resort in his circle, so Himmler spent more and more time keeping his competing SS police leaders, governors, recruiters, labor exploiters, camp commmanders, and death squad leaders from going at it amongst themselves.

Finally, the bibliography though dated is excellent, and the index is very good and useful. For a one-volume detailed history of the rise and fall of the SS as an organization I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

A Vencedora

A Sara ganhou o grande premio ! Na realidade o senhor chama-se Zé Vitor e mora em Picoutos. Aqui a foto que me mandou das suas ferias. Ah José Vitor dos Santos Faneca, as saudades que te guardo

Hell's Angels

Das minhas leituras:

So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell’s Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead
of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don’t expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.

Retirado do livro Hell’s Angels de Hunter S. Thompson.

Balzac

A morte também pode ser Bizarra? O grande escritor francês Balzac morreu a 18 de Agosto de 1850, tinha então 51 anos. È uma pena um génio morrer tão novo. Mas não são os seus consagrados dotes da escrita que o trazem a este blogue e sim as causas da sua morte, 40 chávenas de café por dia levaram-no a 7 palmos debaixo da terra, ou pelo menos é o que alguns acreditam. Pouco mais de 150 anos depois as causas de morte ainda estão por explicar, mas esta versão é no mínimo peculiar….