Looting the public coffers? Influence-peddling? Corruption? Putin’s government sounds positively Western, though the author...
A resounding indictment of the Russian leader into whose soul George Bush recently peered and pronounced himself satisfied.
That was the wrong conclusion to draw, to trust Novaya gazeta correspondent Politkovskaya’s furious attack on the person and government of Vladimir Putin. The leaders of the West, she writes, have found it useful to pretend that Putin merits their respect, and with their crowning him an equal “Putin’s reign reached its high point, and almost nobody noticed.” The former KGB general made it clear that enemies of his regime needed to take notice, however; by Politkovskaya’s account, his years of rule have been marked by a return of Stalinist measures ranging from the imprisonment of political enemies in psychiatric hospitals to the show-trial persecution of men and women above suspicion—all very familiar to older Russians who grew up under Sovietism. “Nobody has any hard facts,” she writes, “but everybody is frightened, just as people used to be.” But there’s a big difference: whereas the pride of the USSR was its military, today’s Russian armed forces are staffed by brutal officers who rob their subordinates and sometimes kill them for pleasure, or, at the opposite extreme, by dedicated, brilliant officers who go unpaid and near-starving, maintaining their men and equipment through the charity of their neighbors. Who profits by undermining Russia’s security? The same mafiosi and oligarchs and developers to whom Putin has handed over control of the economy, Politkovskaya thunders, thereby satisfying one of the three preconditions for getting ahead in today’s Russia: “First, you have to initially get a slice of the state pie—that is, a state asset as your private property.”
Looting the public coffers? Influence-peddling? Corruption? Putin’s government sounds positively Western, though the author suggests that it’s the same old oriental despotism—and urges that her readers, Russian and otherwise, not allow “political winter” to descend again.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7930-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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