Solid overall, as crystal-ball geopolitical treatises go, though with enough hedging to allow for a broad range of outcomes.
It’s only a matter of time, writes longtime Russia hand Lourie (A Hatred for Tulips, 2007, etc.), before Vladimir Putin oversteps his bounds and his imperial project comes tumbling down. Or is it?
There are large questions tucked away inside this provocative book, which posits that Putin’s Russia will not long endure in its present iteration. Rather, it will become a more democratic power, or perhaps a more despotic one, perhaps richer or perhaps “no more than China’s gas station and lumberyard.” The author imagines, for instance, a scenario in which the president of Kazakhstan passes away suddenly, leaving a vacuum of power in a region now contested by several state powers, to say nothing of Islamists who will already have enlisted the support of China’s Uighur population. One likely outcome might be that Russia, as it did with the Crimea, would annex Kazakhstan in order to protect the minority Russian population, dealing along the way with the Uighurs, an accidental favor to China. In all this, the balance of power would shift in Russia’s favor—and all because Russia has never been averse to showing force. For all that, writes Lourie, Russia is already showing signs of weakness; he sees in Putin’s recent formation of a kind of army-within-the-army Praetorian guard a nervousness, a fear, while he finds in Russia’s scramble for the Arctic another kind of vulnerability, since “without Western investment, equipment, and expertise, [the Arctic will be] much more difficult to exploit.” Of course, many other writers have predicted Putin’s downfall, and the man has to die sometime. The author does give Putin credit for a few positive accomplishments, and the author assesses a few potential replacements, including Alexei Navalny, a youngish opposition candidate who has publicly characterized Putin’s party as “the party of crooks and thieves” and gotten much traction for it.
Solid overall, as crystal-ball geopolitical treatises go, though with enough hedging to allow for a broad range of outcomes.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-312-53808-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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