Men and Politics
$3.50
By DUELL, SLOAN & PEARCE
THIS massive autobiography (it runs to 672 pages) is also a full-length portrait of European politics and personalities during the last two decades. For Louis Fischer, in the course of a varied career as author, lecturer, and free-lance journalist, has been almost everywhere and seen people of all sorts and conditions on the continent. The two subjects which he knows best at first hand are the Soviet Union and the Spain of the civil war, from the Republican side. But he has discussed Fascist economics with one of Mussolini’s chief lieutenants and discussed Spam before an informal gathering at the British House of Commons, and he knows and likes pre-Hitler Germany. As he tells us, he has never, except for very brief intervals, held a job, never owned any property, and never belonged to any political party. For many years he was one of the ablest favorable interpreters of the Soviet Union; but Stalin’s purges of veteran Communists and the Soviet-German pact have finally made him join the ranks of the disillusioned on this subject. Traces of pro-Soviet bias survive in the autobiography and probably account for the fact that the author, in his long book, finds no space for the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 or for many other atrocities of this phase of Soviet development. In general, however, Mr. Fischer’s work stands, far above the ordinary journalistic autobiography in permanent value, because it is written by a man who can appraise as well as describe the significance of the European tragic era with which he has been in such close contact. W. H. C.
W. H. C. WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN
R. E. D. RICHARD ELY DANIELSON
E. D. ELIZABETH DREW
W. F. WILSON FOLLETT
R. M. G. ROBERT M. GAY