Reggie Nadelson's 'Comrade Rockstar' is well-written and skillfully paced and is filled with intriguing details about this singular figure. Unfortunately, her reactiveness (and, I think, guilt) towards her once-communist mother and her resentment over the leftist legacy of many East Coast Jewish communities turn parts of the book - and almost all of her comments on politics - into a boring and predictable paean to capitalism, the sort of report one became used to hearing at nauseam during the Cold War and which, incidentally, one hears again today in almost all reports in the UK about China. She poses as a leftist and then proceeds to tell us, in multiple harmonies, that she long since has seen the light! She avoids going to the 'side-show' of South America, yet this region was key in Dean Reed's transformation from US pop star to politico. How convenient, to omit 'America's back yard' and to avoid interviewing anyone familiar with Dean Reed from that continent - except a half-crazed, Czech 'countess' who happens to have lived there for a time.
Look, I shared a stage once with the Russian investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, a few months before she was pitilessly murdered in Moscow. I have no illusions about the KGB or its successor, the FSB, nor about the manner in which neither the totalitarian state nor oligarchical corporatism cede power easily or willingly. The brutality of both is self-evident; they damn themselves, without any help from arrogant, smart-alec Western reporters with tongues stuffed into their silly cheeks. You see, there's real political analysis such as that undertaken by Politkovskaya (or, for example, that by the superb and courageous Serbian journalist, Jasmina Tesanovic) and then there's the unthinking parroting of propaganda - and too often, Nadelson is needlessly lazy and swaddles her prose in the latter.
I really would like to read more widely on this subject of Dean Reed. The rock 'n' roll and anthemic political music I've heard on the web, well, it's not really to my taste, though I'd like to hear him sing some Victor Jara songs, some quieter material. Just him and a guitar, in a room. I don't know if any of that's available now.
Nadelson, a talented writer and broadcaster, gave herself away a little too obviously in this book. I know it was published in 1991, during a period of momentous and heady change in Eastern Europe, but the new edition was published in 2004 - after, for example, the US invasion of Iraq, which occured in early 2003, and the establishment and exposure of the American gulag. A little humility would have been more engaging, a little less of the mocking, "he believed" in reference to anyone with left-wing views. Well, Reggie, clearly you also do believe very deeply.
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