George Orwell and Memoirs: How Literature Changes Lives

As I sort out the whole situation, I feel like I am listening to a gigantic concert which weaves the three books, the one by George Orwell, which exposes Stalin’s cruelty, a second by Chalupa’s grandfather which puts a human face on the millions of refugees, and a third by the granddaughter, a book about the other two. In it she shows how Stalin’s madness ripped through history, like a tsunami crashing upon the shores of modernity, and then receded as people grew, recovered, and entered new phases of their lives. To learn more about the creation of this extravaganza of history and literature, I interviewed Andrea Chalupa Continue reading →