A wholly satisfying, likely definitive, but not triumphalist account of the end of an era.
In this thoughtful re-evaluation of a stunning historical watershed, British Soviet specialist Service (Emeritus, Russian History/Univ. of Oxford; Trotsky, 2009, etc.) concentrates on the political maneuvering that was Byzantine and often wrongheaded but rarely dull.
In 1985, the Soviet Union’s elderly leaders knew that their backward economy was incapable of maintaining its superpower status. That year, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power, vowing to change matters. His initial efforts produced deep suspicion in the United States, but Service writes that Ronald Reagan dreaded nuclear war far more than most advisers and led the way. From this point, the author offers an engrossing description of three years during which Reagan and Gorbachev led negotiations that vastly reduced the threat of war. Almost everyone approved of this course of action. Sadly, by 1988, Gorbachev’s liberal reforms had not revived the Soviet Union but reawakened nationalist, anti-Russian, and often nasty ethnic feeling, and his already moribund economy continued to decline rapidly. Exhilarated at the success of the U.S., American leaders delivered free-market platitudes but little aid in response to Gorbachev’s pleas. “Neither Reagan nor Bush,” writes the author, “was minded to bail him out—their priority was to secure international stability and America’s global primacy and they could see no benefit in subsidizing Moscow’s doomed economic reform. Behind the friendly façade of successive summits there lay American toughness in laying down the terms for conciliation.” Of course, in 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Service emphasizes that victory over the Soviets was a good thing, but it was not a good thing to rub their nose in it. These days, Russians dislike America more than they did under Leonid Brezhnev and mostly approve of their pugnacious autocrat, Vladimir Putin, who aims to re-establish his nation as a major power and possesses the nuclear weapons to back this up.
A wholly satisfying, likely definitive, but not triumphalist account of the end of an era.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-499-4
Page Count: 656
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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