For those who want to know the ugly truth of war fought for rubles—or dollars.
Account of the rise of the Wagner Group and other private armies fighting Russia’s war in Ukraine—and many other conflicts.
Lechner, a journalist specializing in Africa, notes that Russian proxies have been popping up all over the continent in places like Mali, the Central African Republic, and Niger, propping up strongmen here and overthrowing them there. These private armies, he writes, are hardly new, having been a fixture of the medieval battlefield and enjoying a resurgence “when European powers competed to carve up the world.” During World War II, Stalin freed prisoners from the Gulag and placed them in the worst sectors of the front to redeem themselves by dying for the motherland. Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group of mercenaries, borrowed a page from Stalin, using the same promise: “Prigozhin, or one of his representatives, visited every minimum- and maximum-security colony except for those in Chechnya and the far-eastern region of Kamchatka.” Survive six months of the Ukrainian war, Wagner promised the prisoners, and you’d be sprung with a clean record and a pocketful of cash—and so it is that the ranks of Russia’s fighters in Ukraine have swelled with soldiers who have no stake in the war except to survive. Prigozhin fell afoul of Vladimir Putin and died in a mysterious 2023 plane crash that was no mystery at all: “Every member of Wagner, every Russian citizen, and the rest of the world were convinced the Russian state had assassinated Prigozhin.” Though largely absorbed within the regular Russian army, Wagner fights on, and it’s not alone; as Lechner writes in this eye-opening exposé, “the world is filled with Prigozhins.”
For those who want to know the ugly truth of war fought for rubles—or dollars.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733361
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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