Richard Pipes Remembers. I was hoping to enjoy the memoirs of Eric Hobsbawm but instead enjoyed reading Richard Pipes' memoirs. I wanted to study Soviet affairs in college, but AUB did not offer Russian and Rashid Khalidi and Hanna Batatu steered me away from my desire to study Kronstadt Rebellion for my PhD dissertation. I used to devour books on Soviet affairs with the same zeal I had for books on the Middle East. For me, Pipes was the dean of the camp of Soviet specialists that I vehemently opposed. I kept Soviet studies as my minor but did not find a Soviet specialist at Georgetown whose politics, nay approach, was to my liking. I drifted off from Soviet studies in recent years and have not kept up with the literature since Gorbachev. But the memoirs of Richard Pipes, Vixi ("I have lived" in Latin) is a very good read, not that the author is good (in the same way that the memoirs of the eccentric `Abdur-Rahman Badawi (in 2 vols) is a great read). Pipes is an unhappy person and it showed in what he wrote. This is a man who studied the Russian people and their culture and yet dislikes them intensely: just as his son, Daniel, studies the Middle East and its culture and dislikes them intensely--outside of Israel, I should add--just to be fair. Pipes does not mention his son: his family seems to him a burden. At one point he talks about harboring a desire to lead a monastic life. He does not shy away from generalizing about whole peoples: the Russians are liars (he says that over and over again), while he found the Chinese "lacking in curiosity."(P. 117). He--just to bug me further--invokes Israel here and there. He is a fanatic Zionist, and adores the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He blames Israel for being soft with the Arabs and for being free of hate (p. 9). Most disturbing about this man is his utter sexism: his offensive generalizations about American women were most offensive to me. He said that "American women of all ages much less secure in their feminity than women in Europe." Whatever that means. He loathes feminism and thinks that feminists "treat all men as would-be rapists." (p. 44) He is, unsurprisingly, very soft on fascism and thinks that fascism has been unfairly treated (p. 19), and then states that fascism basically is a milder version of communism. He rails against all other experts on the Soviet Union who disagree with him (he was disdainful of Jerry Hough--one of my favorites at the time). He thought that a certain book that was critical of his work was "repulsive because it conveyed an anti-Semitic message." What was his evidence of the author's anti-Semitism? Well, the cover had black and yellow colors. (p. 99). I kid you not. His section on his service in the Reagan's NSC is very interesting. You get a good inside view of the inner working and petty squabbles of Washington, DC. His profile of Isiah Berlin is colorful: he succeeds in explaining why Berlin is considered the best conversationalist--ever. He criticizes Harvard for losing its "elitism"--I kid you not. He resents referring to Harvard as "a campus." I read it on the plane yesterday and succeeded in expelling that song from my head: And from the Window, I will throw off myself to you. From the windom.