Starobin’s hands-on examination of Russia’s exile community is a remarkable story of brave people looking to the future.
A veteran reporter introduces us to anti-Putin activists who are building a resistance from abroad.
Starobin, a former Moscow bureau chief for Businessweek, cites an astonishing figure: Since Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, more than 1 million people have fled the country. Many of these exiles have settled quietly elsewhere, but others have continued to fight against Putin however they can. As the author conducted his interviewers, he found a wide range of motivations, from liberals who want to see a democratic Russia to dissident priests who could not accept the Orthodox Church’s support for Putin and his war. Several exiles left because they believed that their outspoken views made them a target, and they still worry that the tentacles of Putin’s security services will reach out for them. Others left Russia simply to avoid conscription into a war that seemed pointless and futile. In fact, the lack of unity is a key weakness for the exiles, and the Kremlin propaganda machine has been able to depict them as a ragtag bunch of noisy troublemakers. One figure that the Putin circle seems to fear, however, is Alexi Navalny, a longtime opponent of Putin who survived a poisoning attempt. Despite being imprisoned in Russia, he has a substantial organization working on his behalf in other countries, and he continues to attract Western support. Still, Putin remains powerful despite the collapse of his plan for a quick victory in Ukraine. Starobin notes that Russia has a history of exiles returning to play a central role, writing that “the lesson of exile movements is that they must be viewed with a long timeframe. Their lifecycle is typically measured in decades.” Many readers will hope that is the case in this situation.
Starobin’s hands-on examination of Russia’s exile community is a remarkable story of brave people looking to the future.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798987053607
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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