Certainly for Kremlinologists but also for readers wishing to better understand how Putin’s Russia has come to look so much...
A veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of Russia’s only independent TV news station paints a revealing group portrait of the entourage influencing Vladimir Putin.
With the likely exception of Dmitry Medvedev, the hand-picked successor whose 2008-2012 reign allowed President Putin to skip over the constitution’s annoying bar to a third consecutive term, few of the names Zygar highlights will resonate with a Western audience. Yet these bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen, each with his own ego, ambition, and agenda, each attempting to divine the will of the leader, each reacting to events, account for Putin’s decision-making. Based on his own research and close observation of the Russian scene for the past 15 years and a large number of personal interviews, Zygar pieces together the depressing story of Putin’s declension. It’s a regression exposed by the president’s choice of best friends among the world’s leaders: from Bush and Blair to Schroeder and Chirac, Berlusconi and al-Assad. It’s a downward slope from necessary economic and military reforms and a commitment to combating Islamic terrorism to the effort to manipulate public opinion, discipline the oligarchs, suppress internal opposition, and steel the government against the “color revolutions” springing up in the post-Soviet and Arab states. Finally, there are the military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, the seizure of Crimea, a shrinking economy, and a forthright anti-West foreign policy. Zygar touches on all the headline-making events familiar to Western readers—the Kursk submarine tragedy, the Chechen terrorist attack in a Moscow theater, the army hazing scandals, the Pussy Riot arrests, the Sochi Olympics, and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya—but this time we see these events through the eyes of Putin’s inner circle, courtiers intent on retaining power and propping up their man.
Certainly for Kremlinologists but also for readers wishing to better understand how Putin’s Russia has come to look so much like the old Soviet Union.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-739-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
PERSPECTIVES
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