Books

‘The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World’ By Karl Schlögel

Is it possible to write a history of the Soviet Union without also writing a biography of Josef Stalin? Karl Schlögel devotes about 100 pages to Stalin and to Stalinism and its aftermath, but these pages hardly constitute a biography.

But then this is archeology, not biography, or even history. Stalin might as well be Ozymandias, a broken statue of a man who thought he was commanding an empire in perpetuity. His legacy is a ruin that is kind of rebuke to biography since, in the end, what he thought he had established has disintegrated.

The final novel of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, brings to a crescendo the themes at work in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. While reading the book in its intended context provides a richer experience, Lewis wrote this final novel so that it could stand alone. For those of us attempting to weather the unsettling global upheavals in the twenty-first century, That Hideous Strength is vital reading to understand the network of connections in the cosmic battle in which we find ourselves.

… As Mark attempts to pierce the inner circle of the institute, he discovers that each higher clique of elites smugly assumes its “real” goals. Planned riots, scripted news stories, corruptly installed officials, checks and balances bypassed as so much “red tape,” declared states of emergencies: the tools of the N.I.C.E. might have come across as unlikely scenarios to Lewis’ original readers. To a reader who has suffered through 2020, 2021, and 2022, it reads like current events. Particularly painful is the sanitation work of the institute, hell-bent upon improving “health” at the expense of much of what makes life livable and dignified.

My favorite book – it changed my life. I was fortunate enough to stumble across it in a bookstore in Cary Village Mall in 1989.

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