A former KGB major's matter-of-fact reminiscences of service as an espionage agent in Iran. Born in Moscow two years after the end of WW II, Kuzichkin was drafted into the Red Army and eventually recruited by the KGB, given advanced training, and posted to Tehran in mid-1977. As a field operative, he worked with in-country illegals willing or forced to supply intelligence to the USSR. Despite diplomatic cover, Kuzichkin often crossed swords with SAVAK, the Shah's ruthless secret police, and later with the Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards. Nor was he as ease with colleagues or members of the Soviet community. For the most part, Kuzichkin found his expatriate comrades a venal and shiftless lot who evaded censure, let alone discipline, for their shortcomings on the basis of clout with the Communist Party's Central Committee. In like vein, he details the many ways in which the putatively omnipotent KGB was prone to err on its own and as the instrument of a corrupt, unprincipled government. Though increasingly disaffected, Kuzichkin soldiered on until realizing he had been set up to take a fall for some purloined documents. He crossed the Turkish border and sought asylum in the UK in mid-1982. At this remove, Kuzichkin offers an insider's enlightening perspectives on the convulsive events that marked his five-year sojourn in Iran. Cases in point range from the establishment of an Islamic republic through seizure of the US embassy, the execution of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Kremlin's decision to invade Afghanistan, and the onset of the Iran-Iraq war. The author also includes an afterword that not only pays graceful tribute to Western democratic values but also excoriates the Gorbachev regime's unavailing responses to civil disturbances unleashed by glasnost and perestroika. Thought-provoking testimony from an erstwhile cold warrior who's not marching anymore.
Pub Date: April 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40146-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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