Work in progress

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination", Shelley wrote in A Defense of Poetry. Unlike many intellectuals who tend to rationalize and minimize the disagreeable chapters in their nation's history, Goldstein not only wishes to tell the truth, but to put himself in the shoes of various victims and even a few of their executioners. That makes 1941 a most unusual book, a story of one family's tragedy that is also a careful work of history, because of its interest in many individual human beings and their parallel stories, often reads like a novel.  

— Charles Simic