A solid and sympathetic portrait of a leader misunderstood and underestimated in the West.
Study of the career of the bibulous Russian president, who, for all his antics, turns out to have been reasonably good at his job.
So suggests Colton (Government and Russian Studies/Harvard Univ.), who considers Yeltsin’s life in parallel with that of sometime ally but mostly rival Mikhail Gorbachev. Both were outsiders from the provinces, both from families that had troubles with the communist regime. In Yeltsin’s case, his kulak grandparents and parents were forced from their property and sent to Siberia, where young Boris grew up as a rebel with a talent for lifting hand grenades from the local arsenal. He settled down as a teenager, notable on the Siberian frontier for not using alcohol or tobacco, gambling or swearing. Yeltsin entered the government ranks as a construction overseer and planner, known for his efficiency in building apartments for the workers (with one complex in Sverdlovsk going up in only five days and thus establishing his fame). As he rose in power, his responsibilities came to include forestry and paper milling, important sectors in the regional economy. He also emerged as a bookish sort, amassing a library of 6,000 volumes of serious literature, some of it, apparently, concerning the economics of free marketers in the West. With the perestroika and glasnost of the 1980s and ’90s, Yeltsin became ever more of a champion of a sort of moderated free-enterprise system, and when he came to the presidency he put several schemes for devolution in place. Though his tenure from 1991 to 1999 was marked by plenty of controversies—and though he seems to have brokered the rise of Vladimir Putin, the current and none-too-democratic Russian president—Yeltsin earns good marks in Colton’s account for his demonopolizing market reforms, political judgment that “repeatedly showed itself to be superior to that of his adversaries” and his certainty that “people power, as channeled in competitive elections, would trump administrative power and build legitimacy.”
A solid and sympathetic portrait of a leader misunderstood and underestimated in the West.Pub Date: April 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-01271-8
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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