BOOKS

GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES, by

Harold Evans (Atheneum). When Harold Evans was sacked as editor of the London Times in 1982, the English satirical gossip sheet Private Eye issued a special memorial issue entitled "Dame Harold Evans... A Nation Mourns." Dame Harold had been an editor of daring and enterprise at the Sunday Times (1967-81), where he shepherded a number of momentous scoops (the Crossman diaries, the thalidomide scandal, the unmasking of Kim Philby) through the briars of. British law. In 1981 the new proprietor of the Times—Rupert Murdoch— had asked Evans to take over as editor of the daily paper and rattle some bones. Evans's wife, the journalist Tina Brown, hoped that Murdoch would prove to be a jolly buccaneer of an owner, cutting a crisp flourish through the gray fogs of the Times-, but others expressed apprehension. One colleague, waving his hand like a fin, warned that Murdoch was a shark whose sudden chomps would leave the water ribboned with blood. Toilingly wordy, Good Times, Bad Times isn't a newspapering classic in the tradition of H. L. Mencken and Claud Cockburn—beneath the book's meandering sentences, one can hear the unsleeping hum of the word processor—but it does show us vividly what it's like to be immersed in a shark tank, blinded by bubbles, fending off sleek treacheries. Good Times, Bad Times is more than disgorged ire, however; it's a portrait of a great institution weathering strife from without and within, and emerging with its walls unbroken.

JAMES WOLCOTT

THE PRINCESS OF SIBERIA: THE STORY OF MARIA VOLKONSKY AND THE DECEMBRIST EXILES, by Christine Sutherland (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). She was a romantic Russian princess with a Byronic imagination. After the ill-fated Decembrist uprising of 1825, in which her husband, Prince Sergei, was an active if uninspired participant, Princess Maria Volkonsky defied her family, left her infant son, and followed her exiled husband to the Siberian wilderness. Her journey by sledge across the Asian continent (she reread Byron's Mazeppa first) was the stuff of legend. Pushkin, one of her early suitors, wrote verses about the raven-haired, bright-eyed princess. A sort of Scarlett O'Hara of the Russian imagination, Maria took Siberia by storm. The land intrigued her with its wild beauty and the mysterious customs of its tribes. Her life there was harsh at first—mud floors, no servants—but Maria made a success of it. During her years at Irkutsk, she built the province's first theater, and whenever she showed up there, the audience rose and cheered.

This is an engaging biography, written with more enthusiasm than art, and illustrated with a wealth of family daguerreotypes and portraits. It succeeds in rescuing a beautiful dreamer from oblivion; and though the author does place this sometimes misguided princess on a pedestal, that is where—even in Siberia— she felt most at home.

CATHLEEN MEDWICK

A WARSAW DIARY: 19781981, by Kazimierz Brandys (Random House). The chances that this superb book will gather an avid American readership are roughly equal to Poland's chances for successful participatory democracy in the coming year. Brandys knows this just as he knows that Westerners rarely interest themselves in the events of Eastern Europe unless they can turn them to Western political ends. In spite of this forbidding climate of indifference mixed with self-interest, Brandys has issued for Western eyes the first important Polish chronicle of his country's democratic uprising.

This is a book filled with history, for Brandys is old enough to have witnessed the last gasp of Polish independence in 1939; it also contains many rueful bits of wisdom aimed at the Western nations that, he feels, have abandoned Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary to guarantee their own well-being. It voices the biting laments of a man who was at one time a member of Poland's Communist Party and later a dissenter from that faith, a man whose livelihood as one of Poland's greatest writers has been filched from him since his fall from party favor. Above all, this is the chronicle of a pessimistic intellectual awestruck by his countrymen's heroic reserves and abashed at his own despair over what he had thought was the thorough Sovietization of their souls.

This is heady stuff for a diary. It is tempered by Brandys's meticulous records of daily life during the years that preceded the declaration of martial law in December 1981 —the endless lines for necessities, the quest for petty luxuries, the routine searches and seizures, the persistence of illness and bad weather— all of which underline the surprising heroism at large in the land.

Clearly, Brandys has seen enough miracles lately to persuade him that nothing fully justifies despair. Surely not the xenophobic reading habits of Americans, and possibly not even the final entry in his Warsaw Diary, dated December 13, 1981, and written from his exile in the United States: "News that martial law has been declared in Poland. All communications cut."

ELIZABETH POCHODA

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