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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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