Reviews for Spirit and Life: Biography of R.G.Coulson, Founder of the Fellowship of Contemplative Prayer

The average rating for Spirit and Life: Biography of R.G.Coulson, Founder of the Fellowship of Contemplative Prayer based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-27 00:00:00 Adrian Yancey Robert Service's Lenin is another effort at presenting the life and figure of the world's greatest revolutionary. Lenin's colossus has been written about before, both by sympathizers and detractors, who arrived at two totally different - and extreme - conclusions. This biography aims to present Lenin without making him a saint or a demon - which is an admirable and immensely difficult effort, if not downright impossible: Service himself isn't able to entirely extricate his own personal views on Lenin from the book, and has been both praised by the mainstream press and critiqued by left-leaning and Marxist organizations. Until recently biographers of Lenin suffered from severe limitations - much of the necessary information was classified and kept in the secret archives of the USSR. Soviet historians have produced a picture of Lenin as according to state ideology: Lenin was a selfless man, who restlessly worked for the Cause, the Great October Socialist Revolution, and the establishment of the people's utopia; In the Soviet Union Lenin has been immortalized in the national anthem and state anthems of all Soviet republics. Statues of Lenin stood in many Soviet cities, his portrait was printed on posters, banners and decorated the Soviet currency. Statues of Lenin still stand inside Russia and in some post-soviet countries and abroad (there's also one in Seattle and one on the roof of a building in New York). This Lenin has been taught across the communist block, with all the necessary panache - my mom was genuinely moved to tears. The lack of information didn't bother Lenin's critics, who had only the story propagated by the state supplemented by unproven rumors and hearsay, but were dedicated to opposing communism and saw discrediting of Lenin, the first Soviet leader, as an important another step on the road to victory. With the Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (openness) implemented in the late 80's, a portion of the secret Soviet archive has been declassified for the first time in history - and for a short time opened for the inquiring scholars, among whom Robert Service was apparently among the first admitted. The result is a thick book - running up to almost 600 pages in paperback - which focuses on Lenin almost entirely. This is both a good and bad thing. The good things is that Service spends a significant amount of space recounting Lenin's early childhood and upbringing. Most of biographers focused on Lenin's later years - his exile in Siberia, life in exile in Switzerland, Germany and the UK. Service quotes from Lenin's private correspondence and the memoirs of those close to him - information I take was previously restricted to create an image of Lenin as seen from different perspectives and illustrate the nature of his relationship with those who observed him. At the same time, Service observes Lenin with a degree of speculation that has little - if any - evidence to back it up: he writes that when presented with a papier mâché horse at the age of three his instinct was to tear it apart: he cites his sister's memoir as a source of young Lenin's boisterousness, stating that there was a degree of malice to his character which his family didn't like. This paragraph is immediately followed by one describing his as being very charismatic and well-liked (and owning up quickly to his misbehaving). All this is coupled with Service's speculations that Lenin's intense hatred for the imperial family could have be a result of the execution of his older brother, Aleksandr, as a result of him being involved in a plot to assassinate the emperor Alexander III. Service actually writes that Lenin enjoyed letting himself loose against the Romanovs and other figure from the old regime as a form of revenge for killing his brother, and the subsequent ostracism that his family faced after Alexandr's execution. These kind of speculations are not backed by evidence and sound very sensationalistic in tone - as if aiming to present Lenin as a child with malevolent tendencies, who was pushed to become a evil figure by a single devastating event which involved a loss of a close relative, as if wanting to simplify this complex man for his audience. And where is great Russia in all this? Service covers Lenin's life year by year, providing the dates and places and describing the events, but the broader historical context is just skimmed upon. The Russian Civil War barely features, and the removal of the Romanov Dynasty and their subsequent execution get little more than a side mention. The Russo-Japanese war and the First World War also should have received more space than they did. While much space is devoted to Lenin's letters and relationships with women important to him - his mother and sisters, Nadezhda Krupskaya - his wife, Inessa Armand - his supposed mistress. Service devotes a significant amount of space to presenting and analyzing the rumored affair between Lenin and Armand, space which I think would be far better used to present the social and political conditions and simple life in revolutionary Russia. Lenin's relationship with people of crucial political importance are barely mentioned. Figures come and go without being properly introduced and established; it's as if Service presupposed that his readers have a certain amount of knowledge about the period that he is describing, which defeats the purpose of writing a biography for the lay reader largely unfamiliar with the subject. Important figures such as Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev are only minor characters, with few details about them presented to the reader; the role of Leon Trotksy, the founded and first leader of the Red Army who organized a partisan force to defend the revolution from internal and external threats - the Red Guard - is barely mentioned; Joseph Stalin's career and rise to power is basically ignored. Stalin gets only a few mentions late in Lenin's life, when the two men began disagreeing about the political structure of the USSR: Lenin wanted to construct a union of autonomous republics on equal terms, advocating the right of the nations to self-determination, while Stalin wanted to simply incorporate the new Soviet republics back into Soviet Russia, fearing that attempts at allowing them even a pretense of autonomy (Lenin admitted that all republics would have only one local communist party, which would still be subservient to the Kremlin) could result in a dangerous resurgence of nationalism, as it happened in the civil war (his words proved true 70 years later). Service notes how Lenin realized that he has underestimated Stalin's intelligence and cunning, and wanted to remove him from power in his political testament - turning away from a man he once called "the marvelous Georgian" - but the beginning and middle of their relationship are simply not mentioned, and from the book we only get a part of the picture of how it degraded to the point of actual hostility between the two. While Service chronicles Lenin's life abroad in many western countries, he never makes clear how exactly he achieved such important and powerful position - and all the prestige - while living in exile. While Lenin is presented as a person willing to take the most extreme position to achieve his goal, it is never made clear how he has managed to win a series of debates with his various opponents to achieve that goal - how did Lenin became the leader of the October Revolution and managed to convince a movement dedicated to overthrowing an autocracy of the necessity of using dictatorship and terror? Why was there a universal agreement about Lenin and why did people follow him? This is a fascinating question which is simply not answered. Service is not the most engaging of writers but is saved by one of the most engaging of subjects, Lenin himself. Still, the book would have benefited greatly by a firmer editorial hand - and possibly even a co-author, who would help to set up the historical context and gave the book a more narrative tone, which would make it much more readable, interesting and informative. The book would also have to be much longer, perhaps split into several volumes to accommodate all the important events and discuss the relevant philosophies and political fractions. Such an essential and definitive work on Lenin still needs to be written, and I will be awaiting its publication.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-27 00:00:00 Vicki Richman When I first read this book for A-Level History I thought it quite good. Coming back at it with more knowledge, I find Service's political and personal bias seeping through at every turn. The research is also not of the highest quality or depth, despite the advantages of historical perspective and access to the Russian archives. Better than Pipes, certainly, but to be taken with copious pinches of salt.