Today's post isn't about the picture (even if there it is a picture!), but a book that I recently read it...
First of all I'd like to say few words about this book's author, Michael Korda. He was born in London, UK, in 1933. He was raised in England, but some of his education comes from France, where his father was working with the French film director, Marcel Pagnol. He graduated the Swiss private college Le Rosey, and then he studied at Oxford University. Also he was enrolled in the Royal Air Force. In the 50's he moves to NYC. In 1958 he joined the book publishing firm, Simon & Schuster, starting as an assistant editor, which included the task of reading "slush pile" manuscripts. He went on to become Editor-in-Chief of the company and was a major figure in the book industry, publishing numerous works by high-profile writers and personalities such as William L. Shirer, Will and Ariel Durant, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. However, from a commercial point of view, Korda is best noted for pioneering novels that in the 1960s were considered as very daring. His authors such as Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins produced blockbuster sales with novels that were highly profitable for the company.
Among Korda's better-known books are "Charmed Lives", which was a memoir about his life with his father and uncle, and the novel Queenie, which is a roman a clef about his aunt Merle Oberon. The latter was adapted into a TV miniseries.
Michael Korda is the father of Chris Korda, the leader of the controversial Church of Euthanasia.
Now, returning to the main subject, the book "Journey to a Revolution", because I'm not a critic of literature and I do not intend to analyze nor evaluate the value of this book, I will touch just few "hot" spots that makes me believe that Mr. Korda was taught by Hungarian politicians about the Hungary's history, not from history books.
This book is his adventure to the 1956's Hungarian anti-communist and anti-soviet revolution, and the reason I bought it and read it, it was the book that I read about 30 years ago, a book about the same subject, but written by the communists, and now I had the chance to read the version of someone from the West.
Mr. Korda starts the book by introducing the Hungarian people, to give the readers a better idea about who the Hungarians are - of course, for those who don't know them, or never heard of them - and he is doing a great job, giving a favorable profile even to the former dictator, Miklos Horthy. What else he's doing, is complaining and verbally attacking many times some countries as Slovakia, Poland and Romania. But he doesn't attack Poland and Slovakia as much as he does with Romania, and yes, that hurts me because I'm a man of peace, I have lots of Hungarian friends, either from Romania or Hungary, and we never had anything to argue about territorial disputes or other historical arguments.
Almost anytime when it's about the foreign politics, the name of Romania appears in discussion, and you guessed well, always having to complain about it. So, Romania had stolen Transylvania from Hungary, Dracula was supposed to be Hungarian, not Romanian, Romania invaded Hungary in 1919 (but he doesn't mention the reason why, 'cause actually French-supported Romanian forces helped Horthy to get rid of the Bela Kuhn's Bolsheviks who seized power in Budapest and were terrorizing the Hungarian people), Romania was the reason they entered the WWII, even if they actually were allied! Romania brought sufferings even to the revolution's leader, Imre Nagy, who was kidnapped by Russians from the Yugoslavian embassy and brought to Romania, of course under arrest, until the things in Hungary were calming down - but here Mr. Korda doesn't specify if Imre Nagy was tortured by Romanians or by Russians, he just says that Nagy was tortured in Romania.
Still, it's very interesting how Mr. Korda blanked out the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, he doesn't say not even a word about this, about the way the Horthy's troops reacted and treated (or should I say "terrorized"?), starting with the deportation of every caught Jew and ending with the expulsion and massacre of the Romanians who refused to leave their ancestral places. Of course, the reason Mr. Korda was doing so, it was to put his father's origin country in a favorable light, 'cause anyway the book was to be published in U.S.A., not in Romania.
Returning to the topic of the book, the Revolution, its description is done in a very professional manner, with data either from his own experience or from documentation - it is normal not to be ubiquitous across the whole Hungary, and reading those lines, I remembered the days of the Romanian revolution in December '89, and I was wondering what would have happened to us if the Russians were coming with their tanks as they did in Hungary?
Going over the moments of "historical madness" (or you can call "sci-fi moments"), the rest of the book is very interesting, is a captivating book that makes you read it without stopping until you reach the last page, without try to cheating by one, jumping a few pages!
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