Breezy but informative and especially useful for readers contemplating a move to Russia for business or pleasure.
A sometimes-jokey but insightful insider’s guide to modern Russia and the Russian mind.
Ask a Russian what he or she is proudest of in the nation’s history, and the answer will likely be, first, defeating the Nazis and, second, annexing Crimea. “A petty land grab,” writes Latvia-born, Berlin-based magazine editor and journalist Idov (Ground Up, 2009, etc.), “beat out Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s space flights, ‘the achievement of Russian science,’ and ‘great Russian literature.’ ” These hallmarks of a triumphant Russia are easily played, as Vladimir Putin has long known. Idov, who ran GQ Russia from 2012 to 2014—he writes entertainingly of the human resources nightmare of trying to fire feckless staffers—is well-versed in the politics of hipster culture as well as the upper echelons of government. The band Pussy Riot may have been adopted as mascots of punky resistance by U2 and Madonna, but at home they’re seen differently, for “no stadium-playing Russian musician…would feel professional affinity with a group of masked activists running around quoting Julia Kristeva.” The Putin government’s take, meanwhile, like that of many Russians, is that the band’s Western supporters are all enemies of the state. “In the Russian mind,” writes Idov, “[Red Hot Chili Peppers singer] Anthony Kiedis takes direct dictation from Foggy Bottom.” Roaming into matters such as the recent conflict with Ukraine over territorial claims, the author considers broadly different perceptions of the world between ordinary Russians and Westerners—as he notes, even the word “Ukraine” means very different things in Ukrainian and Russian. Perhaps most newsworthy, speaking of different perceptions, he offers a sighting of Donald Trump Jr. in Moscow and ventures the thought that the Trumps don’t consider Russians of their circle to be foreign agents precisely because “they belong to the same global class, that of second-rate nightclubby strivers; they are all compatriots in a supranational state of poshlust.”
Breezy but informative and especially useful for readers contemplating a move to Russia for business or pleasure.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-22315-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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