RaveThe Washington Post... beguiling ... the most probing memoir yet produced of the undefined \'transition\' period after European communism. But it is more profoundly a primer on how to live when old verities turn to dust. Ypi has written a brilliant personal history of disorientation, of what happens when the guardrails of everyday life — a family’s past, the signposts of success, the markers of a normal future — suddenly fall away.
Thomas E. Ricks
PositiveThe Washington Post... a rich compendium of the ancient wisdom that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison believed they were gleaning from Aristotle or Tacitus, and the formation of \'classically shaped behavior\' in the early republic ... As Ricks’s searching account shows, what feels truly elegiac is to be reminded of a time in American history when political leaders, for all their faults, valued erudition and, yes, a certain brand of virtue as ideal qualities in public life.
Helen Rappaport
PositiveThe Washington PostHelen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution is an enlightening cavalcade of people on the move — running across the frosty paving stones in Petrograd, arriving on a steam train, waving goodbye from a military transport, all caught up in the uncertain transformation of the world’s largest country. It is a reminder of the fact that outsiders of all sorts rushed to cover the events in the faltering empire, from the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to the unsung American journalist Bessie Beatty. It is a catalogue of witnesses pulled from an exhaustive reading of European and American memoirs and on-the-spot reporting, and a testament to the supremely bad forecasting of foreigners eager to make sense of the moments they were experiencing.
Will Englund
PositiveThe Washington PostEnglund deftly intertwines the Russian story with the American one, in an eventful month that launched America into the world and signaled Russia’s temporary retreat from it. But the causal connections are opaque. March 1917 is a remarkable portrait of two countries on the cusp of change, but their entry and exit were ultimately minor drivers of the near-term military and political outcomes across Europe and beyond.
