THE GINGERBREAD RACE: A LIFE IN THE CLOSING WORLD ONCE CALLED FREE

First impression of the true first edition with full number-string including the no. "1": 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 on publisher's copyright prelims page. ***Fine in black cloth-covered boards with silver titles to black board spine. Tail of spine slightly bumped. Black front and rear free endpapers and pastedowns. No inscriptions. Pages clean and bright. Spine tight. In a near fine colour illustrated dustwrapper that has not been price-clipped, showing the original publisher's price of £17.99 net. Inner edges of rear dustwrapper slightly dusty. No tears. No fading. Spine and front and rear panels of dustwrapper bright. ***242mm x 160mm. 344 pages including detailed notes and index to rear. ***'At the height of the era of rhetorical antagonism known as the Cold War, a young man, son and grandson of Russian writers, crossed the border to the West. He had never attended soviet school and spent his childhood reading Xenophon in the fabulous seclusion of a summer enclave near Moscow, were Stalin's henchmen like Andrei Gromyko had their villas. Escape to freedom was an obsessive dream, as it had been his father's and grandfather's. What would he find in New York, New Haven and London, when this dream came true? ***He arrives in the United states in 1972. he attends Yale University, later becoming editor and publisher of The Yale Literary Magazine, america's oldest review, established in 1821. Under his direction, the independent magazine develops into a focus of national media controversy and is eventually shit down by the University administration. Against the contrasting background of democracy's myths and fictions, the political culture of George Bush's America reveals its ghoulish secret, deriving the young writer to the brink of madness. ***If ideas are born, live and have a history, then The Gingerbread Race is an autobiography of ideas. Dissecting illusions with reality, the book is a lyrical post-mortem of the social organisms once known as the East and the West. it is also a ruthless glimpse of their mutual interpenetration, and gradual transformation into a social hybrid without precedent. The Gingerbread Race is a prophecy whose author, like George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four and more recently Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, writes in the hope of being prove wrong.'' (Quote from inside front of dustwrapper blurb). ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.…