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
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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