Customer Reviews
Walking in the shade of communism - By: Luc REYNAERT, 12 Oct 2007 
This second part of Doris Lessing's candid biography, which depicts her difficult beginnings in London, is a more bitter report than the first one. It is full of personal & ideological disappointments.
Like so many young intellectuals in Europe, she finds a shelter in the leftist Church (with capitalism as hell, Lenin, Stalin or Mao as Christ the Saviour, & Utopia as heaven) & becomes a believer in heart & soul. She still has difficulties to believe why she was so blind (even after a trip to Russia) & stayed so long with the communist movement. For her fellow companions she thinks that they stayed because they wanted to be part of an elite & a power club. The agonizing psychological struggle to become an apostate is very emotionallly told.
What saved her was art, in which she has a limitless belief: it can overthrow world powers.
This is a moving, uninhibited & realistic work, exemplary for many idealistic but wilfully deceived young people in the nineteen fifties & sixties.
Not to be missed.
Second volume of autobiography - By: , 22 Jun 2002 
The second volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, taking us from her arrival in London in 1949 to the publication of her seminal 'Golden Notebook' in 1962.
'Walking in the Shade' takes us into a darker world: her struggles as a single parent, making her way in a male world; her political battles & disillusionment; fraught relationships & emotional turmoil; & her determination to win through & maintain independence through her literary skills.
