Readers aiming to follow the fighting should read the daily news, but for a complete picture, this is the book.
An insightful and discouraging study of a conflict that goes back further than February 2022.
A prolific, lucid scholar with a host of books about Russia and Ukraine under his belt, Plokhy opens his latest with a chronicle of the 1,000-year rise of the Russian/Soviet empires. In the remainder of the narrative, he examines the past three decades, during which the empire collapsed, declined into misery and a failed democracy. Plokhy emphasizes that Vladimir Putin considers the Soviet collapse a tragedy and yearns to reestablish Russia—if not as an empire, at least as a rival power to America and China with a vast sphere of influence. Putin’s vision has been no secret to its newly independent neighbors, who yearned for NATO’s protection. Seven of these Eastern European nations joined NATO in 2004. America supported Ukraine’s application, but France and Germany, uneasy about Putin’s fierce opposition, vetoed it. At first, Putin attempted to win over Ukraine by the same means he used in Russia, but, although chaotic and corrupt, Ukraine remained a democracy. Amenable to Putin’s pressures, its president could do little without parliament’s consent, and unlike Russia’s curiously well-behaved opposition, Ukrainian protesters turned out in massive numbers. In 2014, a frustrated Putin annexed Crimea and two eastern Ukrainian provinces. This had the unexpected consequence of eliminating most Russian-speaking sympathizers and uniting the remaining Ukrainian people. Plokhy identifies that annexation as the beginning of the current war. Putin invaded under the delusion (shared by America in earlier invasions) that the enemy would welcome his army; it was the first of many disappointments. Plokhy devotes half his text to the conflict itself, and so far, no unexpected surprises have turned up in the news. Russia’s initial advances were followed by successful Ukrainian counterattacks, and the war seems to have settled into a brutal, high-tech slog. The text includes maps.
Readers aiming to follow the fighting should read the daily news, but for a complete picture, this is the book.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781324051190
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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