A well-executed anthology on a difficult subject, with a strong variety of insider perspectives on the Russian chimera.
A variegated, intense compendium of contemporary thought on the Russian future, providing a plenitude of useful and thought-provoking viewpoints.
This anthology arose out of a Library of Congress conference convened by the Templeton Foundation in an attempt to counter a normally pessimistic field with unorthodox strategies and positive examination. Vanden Heuvel (former Deputy US Representative to the UN) organized it into four sections, concentrating on the establishment of standards of freedom and ethical conduct in legal affairs, the nascent free-market economy, the post-Communist civil society, and unfettered inquiry and belief. Most of the contributions here are unorthodox. Onetime political prisoner and social activist Boris Putintsev opens strongly with a sharp assessment of the endurance of moribund ideologies (“a political union between Communists and neo-Nazis looms large”). Marat Salikov, a pioneer in Russian constitutional law, contributes a clear, energetic overview of the Russian legal system’s ragged development of an independent judiciary during the 1990s, while Siberian newspaper editor Sergei Komaritsyn offers a penetrating discussion of the relationship between the developing above-ground economic state and the impending power plays between such oligarchic figures as Iurii Luzhkov and Aleksandr Lebed (who still wield much of the real power behind the scenes). Other distinguished contributors include Ural State Law Academy professor Irina Reshetnikova (whose brief piece extends earlier discussions regarding justice in society into the realm of civil ethics) and the Soros Foundation’s Mikhail Kaluzhskii (who discusses the turbulent role of foreign funding). Arkadii Novikov’s “Adventures of a Restaurateur” is disappointingly disingenuous in blandly depicting his success with high-end “theme” restaurants to service Russia’s nouveau riches (while avoiding thorny issues of organized-crime pressures and regulatory corruption). Librarian of Congress James Billington ties it all together with a fine conclusion, depicting the collisions between creativity and chaos that has marked Russia since August 1991.
A well-executed anthology on a difficult subject, with a strong variety of insider perspectives on the Russian chimera.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-890151-43-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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