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
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 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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