A fast-moving and readable yet unsurprising tale of wealth and power in the new Russia.
The rise and fall of a single oligarch as a gaudy microcosm of post-communist Russia.
The prolific Mezrich (Seven Wonders, 2014, etc.), author of Bringing Down the House (2002) and The Accidental Billionaires (2009), takes a sprawling, episodic approach to portraying the brutally absurdist era spanning Boris Yeltsin’s and Vladimir Putin’s regimes, approximately 1994 through 2013. He focuses on Boris Berezovsky as the exemplar of a strange new oligarchic class. Once an obscure mathematician, he began his rise as a car dealer but soon obtained interests in oil, metals, and TV, purchasing a state-owned network that ultimately put him at odds with Putin. Introduced in the midst of an assassination attempt against him (typical of Mezrich’s focus on dramatic incident), Berezovsky seems a vulgar striver yet an oddly sympathetic protagonist, even though many around him came to bad ends. Following his brush with death, Berezovsky initially appeared unstoppable. He became a power within the struggle to keep the unhealthy Yeltsin in office, and he formed a lucrative partnership with Roman Abramovich, a youthful petroleum entrepreneur who initially seemed the ideal protégé. However, the oligarchs went astray in selecting the equally ambitious Putin to succeed Yeltsin: “Berezovsky firmly believed Putin to be [a] perfect cog; a strongman who could be controlled.” But Putin made his intentions clear from his presidency’s outset, “presenting himself as the man who would clean up the chaos and drive the Oligarchs out of politics.” Ultimately, Berezovsky’s resistance to Putin resulted in his exile. As in previous books, Mezrich has a glib, easily comprehensible style, producing an engrossing narrative that stays on the surface of things. The events leading to Berezovsky’s downfall become repetitive and blurry, while interesting side journeys, such as the disastrous 2000 sinking of the Kursk, are only briefly explored. The tale ends abruptly with Berezovsky’s apparent suicide, not really probed despite obvious unanswered questions.
A fast-moving and readable yet unsurprising tale of wealth and power in the new Russia.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7189-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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