Readers aiming to follow the fighting should read the daily news, but for a complete picture, this is the book.
An insightful and discouraging study of a conflict that goes back further than February 2022.
A prolific, lucid scholar with a host of books about Russia and Ukraine under his belt, Plokhy opens his latest with a chronicle of the 1,000-year rise of the Russian/Soviet empires. In the remainder of the narrative, he examines the past three decades, during which the empire collapsed, declined into misery and a failed democracy. Plokhy emphasizes that Vladimir Putin considers the Soviet collapse a tragedy and yearns to reestablish Russia—if not as an empire, at least as a rival power to America and China with a vast sphere of influence. Putin’s vision has been no secret to its newly independent neighbors, who yearned for NATO’s protection. Seven of these Eastern European nations joined NATO in 2004. America supported Ukraine’s application, but France and Germany, uneasy about Putin’s fierce opposition, vetoed it. At first, Putin attempted to win over Ukraine by the same means he used in Russia, but, although chaotic and corrupt, Ukraine remained a democracy. Amenable to Putin’s pressures, its president could do little without parliament’s consent, and unlike Russia’s curiously well-behaved opposition, Ukrainian protesters turned out in massive numbers. In 2014, a frustrated Putin annexed Crimea and two eastern Ukrainian provinces. This had the unexpected consequence of eliminating most Russian-speaking sympathizers and uniting the remaining Ukrainian people. Plokhy identifies that annexation as the beginning of the current war. Putin invaded under the delusion (shared by America in earlier invasions) that the enemy would welcome his army; it was the first of many disappointments. Plokhy devotes half his text to the conflict itself, and so far, no unexpected surprises have turned up in the news. Russia’s initial advances were followed by successful Ukrainian counterattacks, and the war seems to have settled into a brutal, high-tech slog. The text includes maps.
Readers aiming to follow the fighting should read the daily news, but for a complete picture, this is the book.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781324051190
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.
A highly instructive exploration of “current affairs and…the immediate future of human societies.”
Having produced an international bestseller about human origins (Sapiens, 2015, etc.) and avoided the sophomore jinx writing about our destiny (Homo Deus, 2017), Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) proves that he has not lost his touch, casting a brilliantly insightful eye on today’s myriad crises, from Trump to terrorism, Brexit to big data. As the author emphasizes, “humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths.” Three grand stories once predicted the future. World War II eliminated the fascist story but stimulated communism for a few decades until its collapse. The liberal story—think democracy, free markets, and globalism—reigned supreme for a decade until the 20th-century nasties—dictators, populists, and nationalists—came back in style. They promote jingoism over international cooperation, vilify the opposition, demonize immigrants and rival nations, and then win elections. “A bit like the Soviet elites in the 1980s,” writes Harari, “liberals don’t understand how history deviates from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality.” The author certainly understands, and in 21 painfully astute essays, he delivers his take on where our increasingly “post-truth” world is headed. Human ingenuity, which enables us to control the outside world, may soon re-engineer our insides, extend life, and guide our thoughts. Science-fiction movies get the future wrong, if only because they have happy endings. Most readers will find Harari’s narrative deliciously reasonable, including his explanation of the stories (not actually true but rational) of those who elect dictators, populists, and nationalists. His remedies for wildly disruptive technology (biotech, infotech) and its consequences (climate change, mass unemployment) ring true, provided nations act with more good sense than they have shown throughout history.
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-51217-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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