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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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