Deserter from Death

Daniel Singer
March 2005     ISBN: 1560256427

Four years since the death of Daniel Singer, Deserter from Death presents much material that will be new to readers, including his coverage of the Algerian crisis in the late fifties and the tumultuous events of May '68. Born in Poland in 1926, Singer narrowly escaped the Holocaust to become one of the Left's leading social and political commentators. His writing displays a thoughtful, principled attention to the complexity of events and individuals; his work on the Cold War, for example, rejects the seductions of the bourgeois West as much as the dogmatism of the Soviet Union.

In Deserter from Death, the journalist and historian levels his "Balzacian eye," as Gore Vidal described it, on the defining events of the past half-century. Encompassing the dazzling career that Singer began as a reporter for The Economist and ended as The Nation's European correspondent, this book is an effervescent social history.

Daniel Singer was born in Warsaw on September 26, 1926, was educated in France, Switzerland and England and died in Paris on December 2, 2000. He was a contributor to The Economist, the Times Literary Supplement, the International Socialist Review and The Nation, where he was European correspondent.