This week, an insider look at Zelensky, and a deeper look at the Holocaust.
THE SHOWMAN: INSIDE THE INVASION THAT SHOOK THE WORLD AND MADE A LEADER OF VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY
By Simon Shuster
Published by William Morrow (January 23, 2024)
Hardcover $27.99
Audiobook $14.99
Reviewed by Tom Gallagher
How do you write an enthralling book on a war that’s showing no signs of ending soon? Or a biography of a president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is only now experiencing the toughest challenges of his first term? It’s a challenge journalist Simon Shuster explicitly acknowledges in his first book, The Showman.
Shuster, who writes for Time, has had insider access for much of Zelenskyy’s presidency and before, going back to the days of his nascent candidacy as a political newcomer. For events prior to Shuster’s access to the administration’s war bunker on Bankova Street in Kyiv, the author assembles the story of Zelenskyy’s life and of the war through interviews with the most senior people in Ukrainian politics and society.
These insights from people who were “there” make the first few chapters easy page-turners as we’re quickly drawn into the events of February 24, 2022, and the shock that persisted for days around Ukraine. When I say those who were “there,” I mean those in the halls of governance. I was one of tens of millions who was there on that bright winter day when what we had been anticipating for weeks with a quiet tension was finally visited upon us. We were under full-scale invasion, and nothing about life was predictable anymore. What Shuster’s book does is give a complete narrative of those days and months as experienced by the president, his family, and closest advisors that few of us outsiders would have ever known about.
Written in English for foreign audiences, the events covered in the book will likely be equally compelling, but I suspect the names and personalities might be a little difficult to keep straight for many. Shuster makes an effort, but there’s no doubt that even among the informed readers, these are not household names outside of Ukraine.
Perhaps the most important of the other prominent figures is General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. Zaluzhnyi features throughout the storyline but comes more into focus in the final chapters. Those chapters generally cover events through the autumn 2022, when Ukraine experienced the heady days of the successful counter-offensives of Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts. But what Shuster does, whether by foresight or his apparent penchant for the dramatic, is show where conflicts emerged between Zelenskyy and his top general as well as the media. Now, a year later, those tensions are becoming public and more clear. Zelenskyy’s star has certainly faded, but only from supernova status to that of a remarkably popular national leader.
While the end of the book can feel as incomplete as the second film in a trilogy, I had more difficulties with Shuster’s occasional misrepresentation of Eastern European history prior to 1991 and his more frequent mischaracterization of weapons systems and their capabilities. In and of themselves, these won’t trouble most readers, but therein is what troubles me. There are certainly areas covered in the book where I am not an expert and where I must accept Shuster’s authority. This becomes difficult when he’s been inaccurate about other points of fact.
Beyond those occasional questions of accuracy and a sense of wandering in search of a purpose at book’s end, Shuster does effectively deliver on the primary conflict of the book. He successfully captures Zelenskyy as a man in transition and deeply embattled. We meet Zelenskyy as an idealist, the hard-working empathetic “showman” who pursues politics to make a difference, to change the system, to rid it of its needless excesses and get on with doing the people’s work. Like many idealists before him, Zelenskyy finds a world far more complex; where doing what you need for the people might require bending the rules he once promised he wouldn’t. He comes to believe that he can trust no one, even his closest allies, and perhaps even his general staff. And what Shuster leaves us with is the very pertinent question: Can we still trust Zelenskyy?
Tom Gallagher has lived in Lviv, Ukraine for almost six years and presently does material support for a recon team in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, while continuing to support children’s charities in Kherson. In 1995-96, he paid rent to live in his brother’s basement in Fredericksburg while coaching MWC rowing. He still visits Fredericksburg regularly.
THE HOLOCAUST: AN UNFINISHED STORY
By Dan Stone
Published by Mariner Books (January 23, 2024)
Hardcover $27.62
Paperback $17.83
Audiobook $14.99
Reviewed by David Arndt
When World War II began with the Nazi invasion of Poland, most people underestimated the coming length and intensity of the war. On a simplified basis, the war started with German aggression and determination to become a European power through political and racial divides, it grew with the invasion of or collaboration with its neighbors, intense warfare with its enemies, and with the systematic purging from within of the “undesirables” or people who did not fit into their world vision. In this last situation, the Holocaust occurred with the intention to rid the world of Jews and others whose existence was abhorrent to the German regime. In his book, The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story, author Dan Stone reexamines this tragic event and expands its scope, history, and complexity.
The author divides his book into several sections, each pertaining to and reviewing a portion of the Holocaust that has either been overlooked, downplayed, or forgotten. For example, anti-Semitism did not originate with the rise of the Nazi political machine. The Nazis, with their fervent and intense hatred turned to slaughter, happen to be an immediately recognizable manifestation of this sentiment.
Before the death camps and slaughter of the Jews with machine-like efficiency, the Nazi question of how to deal with them had often been debated. Construction of Jewish ghettos arose as a method to control and localize them. The regime contemplated the idea of deporting them out of Europe altogether; with the Madagascar plan, the idea was to forcibly send them off to that African island, although as the author points out, without training, infrastructure, or supplies, this would have effectively been a death sentence as well. Prior to the camps being used as slaughterhouses, German troopers were often sent to Jewish areas and slaughtered the residents in their towns. Thus, Stone points out that the death camps were not the only means of control or execution.
Stone also pushes the reader to consider the breadth of the Holocaust and Germany’s neighbors’ reaction to it. Some of the collaborating neighbors seemingly embraced the idea, eagerly dispatching their citizens, while other countries were willing to send foreign Jews, but not those from their respective country. These concepts question the idea of the Holocaust being a uniquely German initiative.
The Holocaust, to say the least, is an intensively complex and horrific event from World War II. A professor of modern history and the director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway in London, the author has performed several decades of research in culmination of this incredible book, encouraging the reader to learn and understand. Dan Stone’s ultimate goal is to inform the world how and why it happened, with the hope that it will not be repeated again.
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