A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.
Moody Russian days from London Times correspondent Bennett.
The journalist had flirted with Soviet Russia for some years before 1991, when she wangled a job as a foreign correspondent for Reuters and the Los Angeles Times. Here, she doesn’t concentrate on the breaking stories of the time, but on the less covered subjects of daily life, personal bemusements, and food. For the Russian on the street, as Bennett sees it, food is love, and caviar is its purest expression: “Does caviar actually taste good? That question is pointless. Your spoonful of black eggs is full of far more than salt and oil and protein. It is weighed down with symbolism.” Yes, Bennett likes the taste, but she likes caviar’s symbolism even more: it’s the food of regret and nostalgia, of conquest (“a delicacy snatched from the mouths of the defeated khans”), of dashing, freebooting Cossack caviar traders. Thoughts on this quintessentially Russian delicacy wend their way through the story, but don’t overwhelm it. Bennett is interested in topics as diverse as azart, the give-a-damn strain running through many Russians in the early 1990s that means “not being satisfied that you’ve got enough till you’ve got far too much.” She’s fascinated by the old southern lands—“Dagestan, a poor, crime-ridden and mostly Muslim place next door to poor, crime-ridden, mostly Muslim Chechnya”—and more taken with the fantastical coups and crazy semi-wars of the region than the big bloodbath in Chechnya (though she published a book about it, Crying Wolf, in the UK). The more obscure conflicts tell us more about life in the area, Bennett believes. She also notes, as press reports rarely do, that after all the insanity, “gradually people went back to living their real lives. . . . Most people were sick of excess.” Azart was replaced with “a taste for dull bourgeois luxuries,” and “everyone I knew had a respectable job to go to in the mornings.”
A realistic and lingering picture of evolving Russia.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7553-0063-7
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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