An engaging, poignant portrayal of one of the most significant of Russian leaders.
The long-awaited biography of the enigmatic Soviet leader whose “new thinking” sent shock waves throughout the Soviet Union and indeed the world.
Taubman (Emeritus, Political Science/Amherst Coll.), who won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize for Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003), is perfectly qualified to delve into the political psyche of Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), who had everything to do with ending the Cold War and managed to emerge—rather miraculously unscathed—from the layers of Soviet intrigue. The author delivers a series of intriguing questions to drive his page-turning, chronological narrative—e.g., “how did he become Communist party boss despite the rigorous imaginable arrangement of checks and guarantees designed to guard against someone like him?” From his earliest years, Gorbachev, the son of peasants, developed a remarkable self-confidence derived from a tremendous intelligence and dedication to join the great mission of his country. His early education at Moscow State University, work on a collective farm, and formative first job as head of the Komsomol regional committee in Stavropol gave him a good sense of how “rotten” the inner workings of the Soviet system had grown. Moreover, his close relationship with his wife, philosopher Raisa Titarenko, provided him an intellectual partner with whom to exchange and develop his ideas of reform. Those ideas evolved through the de-Stalinization campaign of the Khrushchev years and the subsequent smashing of the Prague Spring of 1968. Indeed, Gorbachev referred to himself as a “man of the sixties” who gradually ascended the ranks under Leonid Brezhnev and was the only viable leader who remained to take the reins in 1985 after the power vacuum left by the deaths of the aged leaders Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. He was young, groomed, well-read in texts once banned by the Soviets, and Westernized, and he had a glamorous, intellectual equal as a wife—all of which allowed him to take the world by storm. Taubman follows it all with gusto.
An engaging, poignant portrayal of one of the most significant of Russian leaders.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-64701-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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