A vivid, chilling portrait of a Russia grown “scary and unpredictable.”
A scathing indictment of Vladimir Putin’s “police state” that offers compelling evidence of his absolute suppression of any opposition or exposure of the state’s corruption.
Knight (How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies, 2006, etc.) builds a convincing case for high-level Russian ordering of political murders, from liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova to outspoken journalist Anna Politkovskaya to opposition leader Boris Nemtsov—among many others. The murder of Kremlin opponents has been a robust tradition since czarist times, gaining Bolshevik impetus under Lenin’s Cheka and ferocious momentum under Stalin’s Great Purge and the notorious long arm of the KGB. Though Boris Yeltsin dissolved the KGB, it was reconfigured by political necessity as the FSB, with former KGB lieutenant Putin as director. Knight looks at the so-called siloviki (those running the “power ministries”) as holding not only the power in the country, but the secrets about one another that maintain that power. When these secrets were revealed—e.g., by journalists or brave government officials investigating Russia’s brutal crackdown in Chechnya or the 1999 “apartment bombings”—the victims were marked and murdered Mafia-style, their deaths blamed on “terrorists.” The 2006 death by poison of former KSB officer–turned-whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko in London created an international scandal. However, as shockingly blatant as the death was—polonium 210 was such a rare and lethal substance that it could only have been procured by the FSB—the lack of political pressure on the Putin regime by the U.S. and elsewhere has been puzzling and outrageous. Essentially, Knight astutely asserts, Putin brazenly invites suspicions on Kremlin involvement “as a way to intimidate those who oppose him.” The author also examines the story of the Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetuated the Boston Marathon bombings and had traveled in Russia, and she concludes with the rule of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who, on Putin’s direction, has taken the police state to Stalinist proportions.
A vivid, chilling portrait of a Russia grown “scary and unpredictable.”Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11934-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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