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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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