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WHAT'S COOKING IN THE KREMLIN

FROM RASPUTIN TO PUTIN, HOW RUSSIA BUILT AN EMPIRE WITH A KNIFE AND FORK

A bitter history lesson taught with humor and grace.

Penetrating the secrets of the Kremlin through delightful chronicles of the long-suffering chefs who catered to Russian leaders.

In an original work of social history, Polish journalist Szabłowski, the author of How To Feed a Dictator and Dancing Bears, alternates narrative with interviews (and recipes) to delve into some recondite and often apocryphal stories of the people who cooked for the Russian elite, from Ivan Kharitonov, the chef executed with Tsar Nicholas II in 1918; to Polina Ivanovna, who cooked “the Soviet Union’s last supper.” What the author learned can be summed up in two sentences of Russian propaganda: “It doesn’t matter if a story is true. What matters is that people believe it.” Case in point: Vladimir Putin’s grandfather, Spirodin, cooked in various Russian sanitoriums, but claiming that he served Russian leaders from Rasputin to Stalin was great propaganda when Putin was campaigning for office. Over years, Szabłowski has tracked down many of his elusive subjects, and he tells a wide variety of entertaining stories about this colorful cast of characters, including longtime Kremlin chef Viltor Belyaev, who relates detailed, chilling, and priceless stories about cooking for Brezhnev and Gorbachev; the devoted cook who created food in tubes for cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s mission to space in 1961; and the doomed kitchen staff assembled for the clean-up crew after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The author includes horrific eyewitness accounts of Ukrainians surviving the Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 (“Every seven minutes someone in Ukraine died of starvation”), as well as those who suffered during the two-year German siege of Leningrad. Szabłowski also relates the saga of the intrepid “Mama Nina,” who cooked for a Soviet airbase in Afghanistan, with little understanding of the nature of the war. The author closes with a poignant, timely look at the tenuous culinary culture of the Tatars, who were nearly eliminated from Crimea.

A bitter history lesson taught with humor and grace.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023

ISBN: 9780143137184

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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HISTORY MATTERS

A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.

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Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.

McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”

A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025

ISBN: 9781668098998

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025

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A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A CARTOON COLLECTION

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

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The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.

Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

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