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
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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