MixedNew York Times Book ReviewNursing hopes of regime change made life in exile bearable. But did the émigrés ever stand a chance of overthrowing the Bolsheviks? What impact did they have on European political and artistic culture as the clock ticked down to World War II? Rappaport’s thickly descriptive, often gossipy history veers determinedly away from the wider and more urgent questions that arise naturally through her narrative ... With new waves of refugees now breaking on Europe’s shores, After the Romanovs offers few grounds for optimism. Those seeking safety beyond the borders of their native lands might aspire to return and reclaim their former lives. But as the fate of those fleeing Bolshevism shows, dreams of restoration often turn to ashes.
Peter Pomerantsev
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... insightful though distractingly underedited ... Pomerantsev diagnoses our fact-distorting age with understanding and acuity, but his proposed remedies are altogether hazier. Nostalgic for the certainty of Soviet dissidents who believed there was \'no middle between truth and lies,\' he calls for the regeneration of \'freedom, rights — all those big words that have been bled of their vitality.\' The final pages briefly sketch out his vision of an online culture that would empower the public to shape the flow of information, and an ethically engaged journalism that would stick to the facts. But amid the countervailing flood of disinformation surveyed, it will take more than such reveries to turn the tide.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...[a] magnificent and harrowing chronicle ... Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s fluent translation of a revised edition of this first book in the series breathes new life into the memories of the war’s female combatants ... Distilling her interviews into immersive monologues, Alexievich presents less a straightforward oral history of World War II than a literary excavation of memory itself ... Resurrecting the ghosts of both the early 1980s and her Soviet self, Alexievich includes several passages that the censors cut and even some that she independently threw out. Her admission of 'my self-censorship, my own ban' points to the culture of silence that may have dissuaded the Soviet Union’s female combatants from telling their stories for themselves. By recalling her own self-silencing, Alexievich takes a place among her subjects and masterfully sets out to correct the record.
