Now, if only Putin would dispense with designating his successor. A clear-eyed, highly readable look at modern Russia, with...
Or: Can democratic reform be entrusted to a former agent of the Soviet secret police?
Boris Yeltsin took pains to present himself as a new breed of Russian democrat, writes Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Jack (The French Exception, not reviewed). But Yeltsin took even greater pains to create “a supra-presidential system,” engineered a constitution that gave most powers to himself, and allowed him to designate his successor. That man, Vladimir Putin, has taken the challenge of reform seriously enough, Jack suggests, especially given his nation’s lack of peaceful oppositional politics, even while playing both sides against an elusive middle and asserting “the restoration and clear reaffirmation of pride in the Soviet Union, stripped of its former ideology.” Putin has weathered all kinds of storms, using the “unexpectedly popular” mess in Chechnya much as President Bush has used 9/11, forging alliances with labor leaders, going after the privileged elite for tax evasion and money laundering, and attempting to set reforms in motion to get workers paid and move things along. He has also made missteps, especially with regard to international relations: drawing close to the US, for instance, instead of the European Union, “much easier . . . if only because it was dealing with a single group of interlocutors, and a more consistent message,” then drawing away to strike a pose of leadership at the start of the Iraq war. Though he evenhandedly gives credit and assigns demerits to the leader, Jack attributes some of Putin’s success to luck—but more to Putin’s ability to use his luck effectively and judiciously, proving in the bargain to be “a far more reliable partner than Yeltsin, with a more realistic view of his country’s capabilities.” That luck is likely to hold, Jack says: Though the signs are clear that reforms will continue without greater democracy, at least the Russian economy is looking up.
Now, if only Putin would dispense with designating his successor. A clear-eyed, highly readable look at modern Russia, with all its ongoing enigmas and mysteries.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-19-517797-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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 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
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