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RUSSIA'S DEAD END

Name: RUSSIA'S DEAD END
Author: Andrei A. Kovalev
ISBN: 978-1-61234-893-3

AN INSIDER'S TESTIMONY FROM GORBACHEV TO PUTIN

by Andrei A. Kovalev ; translated by Steven I. Levine ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2017

Too dense and scholarly for some general readers but astonishing in its relentless frankness and a refreshing report from an...

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Why will democracy refuse to take root in Russia?

In this trenchant exposé of Russia’s totalitarian pathology, Kovalev—who was a member of Mikhail Gorbachev’s secretariat and also worked in the foreign affairs ministry under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin—blames the country’s enduring “slave psychology” for many of its ills, from the time of the czars to the present. The author, whose high-level career took him into the apogee of government power and whose own father was an eminent Soviet diplomat, approaches the unending Russian cycle of tear-down, reaction, revanchism, and stagnation like a social psychologist. In his early job in the late 1980s, Kovalev worked on the “elimination of punitive psychiatry,” which has helped him diagnose Russia’s chronic problems. Perhaps his current exile in Belgium—he found the Putin regime to be too politically oppressive,” and he includes a horrifying chart delineating the attacks on and murders of journalists and editors since 2001—has allowed him the freedom to skewer the unchecked power of the “secret services,” which took on new life after the failed 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Kovalev methodically works through the stages of this failed coup as reflections of the same “monster” of totalitarianism that the liberal reforms of Gorbachev were supposed to eliminate. Under Yeltsin, a “new elite” formed (really just a replica of the old elite), assuming new powers under former KGB chief Putin, whose apotheosis demonstrated that the Russian population could still be manipulated into “subordinat[ing] its own real interests to the sham interests of the state.” Moreover, Putin capitalizes on the Russian sense of nostalgia for the strong-armed leader who reverts to the familiar ideological dogmatism, sounding the hollow notes of the “National Idea”—i.e., patriotism, Russian Orthodoxy, suspicion of mysterious “interventionists,” need for secrecy, renewed imperialism, infantilism, xenophobia, and so on. Ultimately, Kovalev brings us back to the totalitarian state that won’t go away.

Too dense and scholarly for some general readers but astonishing in its relentless frankness and a refreshing report from an insider.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61234-893-3

Page Count: 392

Publisher: Potomac Books

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)