Breezy but informative and especially useful for readers contemplating a move to Russia for business or pleasure.
A sometimes-jokey but insightful insider’s guide to modern Russia and the Russian mind.
Ask a Russian what he or she is proudest of in the nation’s history, and the answer will likely be, first, defeating the Nazis and, second, annexing Crimea. “A petty land grab,” writes Latvia-born, Berlin-based magazine editor and journalist Idov (Ground Up, 2009, etc.), “beat out Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s space flights, ‘the achievement of Russian science,’ and ‘great Russian literature.’ ” These hallmarks of a triumphant Russia are easily played, as Vladimir Putin has long known. Idov, who ran GQ Russia from 2012 to 2014—he writes entertainingly of the human resources nightmare of trying to fire feckless staffers—is well-versed in the politics of hipster culture as well as the upper echelons of government. The band Pussy Riot may have been adopted as mascots of punky resistance by U2 and Madonna, but at home they’re seen differently, for “no stadium-playing Russian musician…would feel professional affinity with a group of masked activists running around quoting Julia Kristeva.” The Putin government’s take, meanwhile, like that of many Russians, is that the band’s Western supporters are all enemies of the state. “In the Russian mind,” writes Idov, “[Red Hot Chili Peppers singer] Anthony Kiedis takes direct dictation from Foggy Bottom.” Roaming into matters such as the recent conflict with Ukraine over territorial claims, the author considers broadly different perceptions of the world between ordinary Russians and Westerners—as he notes, even the word “Ukraine” means very different things in Ukrainian and Russian. Perhaps most newsworthy, speaking of different perceptions, he offers a sighting of Donald Trump Jr. in Moscow and ventures the thought that the Trumps don’t consider Russians of their circle to be foreign agents precisely because “they belong to the same global class, that of second-rate nightclubby strivers; they are all compatriots in a supranational state of poshlust.”
Breezy but informative and especially useful for readers contemplating a move to Russia for business or pleasure.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-22315-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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