With a string of holidays coming up, some of us will want to stock up on some reading. Therefore, I will recommend three books - two of which I don't know but which have been recommended to me by a person whose literary and intellectual discernment I respect. The title I have read but will re-read is an autobiography by a Ukrainian. I cannot recommend it highly enough, although it is a bit slow getting started; it could have used a stronger editor to focus the content a bit. But it is a "must read" for those who really want to understand how genocidal disasters can be, have been and will be manufactured by the Hidden Hand, now called the New World Order, unless the people say: "No more! Not in my backyard, buddy!" Here it is:
- Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust by Miron Dolot. (W. W. Norton & Company, 1985) The dust cover describes it as "Seven million people in the 'breadbasket of Europe' were deliberately starved to death at Stalin's command. This story has been suppressed for half a century. Now, a survivor speaks . . .
- (I)n 1929, in an effort to destroy the well-to-do peasant farmers, Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of all Ukrainian farms. In the ensuing years, a brutal Soviet campaign of confiscation, terrorizing and murder spread throughout Ukrainian villages. What food remained after the seizures was insufficient to support the population. . . .
- This poignant eye witness account of the Ukrainian famine by one of the survivors relates the young Miron Dolot's day-to-day confrontation with despair and death - his helplessness as friends and family were arrested and abused - and his gradual realization, as he matured, of the absolute control the Soviets had over his life and the lives of his people . . . it is an indictment of a chapter in the Soviet past that is still not acknowledged by Russian leaders."
- The second title is by Erich Anton Helfert and is called VALLEY OF THE SHADOW (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 1997) Foreword by Alfred M. DeZayas. $25.00 in Hardcover. Phone: (800) 848-7789. Fax: (510) 848-4844
- The person who sent it to me wrote:
- ". . . I have just received the galley proofs of this work and pass on some details from the blurb and author's biographical sketch. "A fourteen-year old boy witnesses the upheavals, tragedies and displacement sweeping central Europe just prior to and right after World War II.
- He experiences occupation by the Russians, dispossession and displacement, and the tragic loss of his father and brother. He and his mother struggle on, sustained by faith, but shaken by narrow escapes from death camps, daily deprivation and danger, and family betrayal. . . "
- The author was born in the Sudetenland. He graduated from the University of Nevada and the Harvard Business School. He worked for Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco for 20 years. He has published extensively in the field of finance. "His bestseller TECHNIQUES OF FINANCIAL ANALYSIS is in its ninth edition and has been translated into seven languages.
- I understand that official publication date is February 1997 - which means it is already on the market, if I know how a publisher's strategies work.
- I don't have ordering or publishing information on the third one - your friendly librarian can help! - but it is described as follows:
- ". . . I just came across a really great book on the topic of the East German revolution and how different individuals perceived what followed. It's by John Borneman and the title is 'After the Wall'.
- I found it at Crown books, so I assume it is carried by many other book stores as well. I liked it for its very deep understanding of East German mentality as well as its accurate predictions of things to be expected in the future . . . "
- Let this be my Christmas gift to you - the urgent message that there is on earth right now no greater mandate than to read and understand what WILL be coming our way - unless we sit up and take heed. It's urgent!
- In "Political Ideals," Houston Steward Chamberlain gives us a glimpse and an order:
- "We must want the better; then we will win it, too. If we do not want it, if we do not LEARN to want it, if our political life has fallen into senile paralysis, then will the worse . . . deluge us and carry us away into hell, where we belong."
- Ingrid
- Thought for the Day:
- "The honor is yours - but yours also the labor."
- (Houston Steward Chamberlain in "Political Ideals")