A compelling historico-psychological work delineating how the West should respond to Russia going forward.
An incisive exploration of “how and why Russia has returned to the world stage”—and the prospects for the future.
Casting back into the country’s history, Stent, former national intelligence officer and current director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, East European Studies at Georgetown (The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the 21st Century, 2014), offers a deeply informed look at why Russia, directed by President Vladimir Putin, persists in behaving in what the West regards as an exceedingly maddening, paranoid, and often aggressive manner. After “a decade of political chaos and an economic meltdown,” Russia went from being a regional power, according to Barack Obama, to one whose reach “is now clearly global.” Among the many elements that demonstrate how Russia has established a new geopolitical identity: its triumphal staging of the Winter Olympics in 2014 and, later, the 2018 World Cup; the annexation of Crimea; launching of war in southeastern Ukraine; and edging out the United States as the new power broker in the Middle East, specifically in backing Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad in his civil war (“Russia’s first military foray outside the former Soviet borders since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan”). Looking at the country’s past glories and grievances under a series of eccentric, occasionally dangerous czars in order to underscore its unique place in the world and sense of exceptionalism, Stent insightfully dissects its prickly relationship with both the U.S. and many European countries, who had hoped Russia post–Soviet Union would become “a responsible stake-holder in a post–Cold War, rules-based liberal international order [the West] had created.” The author also considers Russia’s “wary” relationships with neighbors China, Japan, and others. As she astutely notes, Russia has always defined itself in opposition to the West, and “isolating [it] and refusing to deal with it, however appealing that may appear to some, is not an option.”
A compelling historico-psychological work delineating how the West should respond to Russia going forward.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3302-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
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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