Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Army, has a vision of an angel of death coming to carry him off, seriously appeals to God for divine intervention on the Russian side in the battle of the Tannenberg Forest, and fails to remember the name of one of his subordinate generals. Like other subjects of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, the general smoothly slips out of the 20th century and falls into an almost insane incompetence...
...beginning of the First World War. Historically, the battle in the Tannenberg Forest was the first of a long series of military catastrophes which led to Russia's defeat in the war, set the stage for the Bolshevik revolution and has had reverberating consequences down to the present time Solzhenitsyn portrays the event in light of these consequences, and adopts a panoramic view that may seem reminiscent of Tolstoy but which is unusual in World War I fiction...
...plot of a panoramic historical novel is fixed. Having selected an event, the sequence of actions involved can only be slightly bent in the interest of artistic validity, and under the circumstances Solzhenitsyn's task is to develop viable characters and invest the chaotic activities in which he deals with some meaning...
...merely "good" books, chosen from the 100 or so that Adler reads each year, have been added, including works by Epicurus, Martin Luther and six writers of the 20th century: Historian Arnold Toynbee, Physicist Max Planck, Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Novelists Henry James, Franz Kafka and Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
FICTION 1-Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Bach (1 last week) 2-August 1914, Solzhenitsyn (6) 3-The Winds of War, Wouk (3) 4-My Name Is Asher Lev, Potok (2) 5-The Dark Horse, Knebe/ (4) 6-A Portion for Foxes, McClary(lO) 7-Captains and the Kings, Caldwell (7) 8-Report to the Commissioner, Mills (5) 9-The Word, Wallace 10-The Terminal Man, Crichton