… you squeal with sincere delight when you open a package from a second-hand bookseller – to see that you have finally received the book you ordered: Stalin and the Kirov Murder, by Robert Conquest.
I squeal with delight over the Kirov murder.
Repeatedly.
Not the fact that it happened … but the fact that I can never read enough about this one particular event. And here’s a whole book about that one thing.
Squeeeee!
More of my ramblings about Kirov here (that was in response to beginning Conquest’s book The Great Terror: A Reassessment).
And … here.
I’ve already been flipping through it. I can’t start it just yet … there are a couple books ahead of it on “the list” – but I am itching to just tear through it.
Hee.
Ha!!!
You should read Conquest’s other books. The three you read are great and I’d have recommended them, though. Don’t miss “A Concise History of the Russian Revolution” by Richard Pipes (Conquest worked on it with him). Also, Conquest’s last books are the best. As I said in a review of his last, the worst of Conquest is better than the best of Chomsky.