It may be that “Russian stories never have happy endings,” but Browder’s account more than compensates by ferociously...
An American-born financier spins an almost unbelievable tale of the “poisoned” psychology afflicting business life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
By 2000, Browder, founder and CEO of the Hermitage Fund, helmed “the best performing emerging-markets fund in the world.” Taking full advantage of the unprecedented investment opportunities available during post-Soviet Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism, a gangland business atmosphere where oligarchs operated with impunity, Browder’s firm became the biggest investor in Russia’s stock market. He owed his rise in part to his willingness to fight back, to alert Western business contacts, to inform the press and to file complaints with government authorities against those corrupting the business culture. For a while, his interests coincided with those of Putin, still busy consolidating power, doing his own bit to rein in the oligarchs. By 2005, however, secure in his authority, Putin revoked Browder’s visa, branding him “a threat to national security.” There followed a series of moves against Browder and Hermitage, including the raiding of the company’s Moscow offices on trumped-up charges of tax evasion and, most notoriously, the arrest, imprisonment, beating and death of tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had helped expose government crime. Browder’s unceasing efforts to achieve justice for his murdered friend and employee culminated in the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a human rights landmark that named and shamed the responsible Russian officials. This well-paced, heartfelt narrative covers the author’s personal life—he’s the son of a famed mathematician and the grandson of Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party USA—his business career, including brushes with the likes of fraudster Robert Maxwell and swashbuckling Ron Burkle; close relationships with billionaires Edmond Safra and Beny Steinmetz; his dealings on the Magnitsky Act with U.S. senators; and Putin’s vindictive retaliatory measures against Browder and the act.
It may be that “Russian stories never have happy endings,” but Browder’s account more than compensates by ferociously unmasking Putin’s thugocracy.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5571-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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