A captivating overview of some of the hard realities of Soviet life.
Motivational speaker and leadership trainer Serio details how he navigated social and cultural expectations in the USSR while observing the Russian Mafia and the Soviet government in this memoir.
In 1984, the author, a sophomore at the State Univ. of New York, Albany, selected a course titled “Who Are the Soviets?” After becoming engrossed in the kaleidoscopic culture of the Soviet Union, he immersed himself in studying the Russian language—a decision that, by 1986, led Serio to visit Moscow. The author discovered that the preconceptions that he held about the Soviet Union were far off, and he quickly met friendly people: “When you’re primed to look for an enemy, you’ll find one,” he concludes. Serio returned repeatedly to the Soviet Union; by age 23, as protégé to Dick Ward, vice chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago and vice president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, Serio attains a position that alters his adult life. It leads him to a job studying the Soviet government’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and the violent Russian Mafia, who are shockingly brutal in their methods. Along the way, a realization regarding Americans’ attitudes toward US-Russia relations unfolds: “We have a bad habit of forgetting our own tumultuous past and excessively corrupt present—and tend to hold others to a standard we ourselves would be hard pressed to meet.” In this narrative, the author offers a highly specific historical treasure trove about the world of law enforcement and villainy in the Soviet Union in its final years. Along the way, Serio effectively humanizes the memorable people he met—such as Volodya (an affectionate nickname for “Vladimir”), an artist at the defense factory Hammer and Sickle Metalworks—who embody the Russian peoples’ frustrations, realizations, sufferings, and disappointments with the country’s largest gang: the Communist Party. It’s an engaging read that unexpectedly fuses elements of the novels The Godfather and Gorky Park while also showing the storied stalwartness of the Russian citizenry.
A captivating overview of some of the hard realities of Soviet life.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 441
Publisher: GTN Media
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
