PositiveThe Washington Post... timely and authoritative ... Gaddis captures why Kennan’s dispatches deserved to be immortalized ... Here is where one can at least gently criticize Gaddis’s book, the sort of tome that is invariably called \'magisterial\' and in this case for the most part is. Gaddis subtitles his book — an authorized biography nearly 30 years in the making — \'An American Life,\' and goes on at great length about Kennan’s critiques of the country of his birth. But Gaddis makes a far less convincing case that Kennan was anywhere near the student of the United States that he was of Russia.
Masha Gessen
RaveThe Washington PostThis is by far Gessen’s best book, a sweeping intellectual history of Russia over the past four decades, told through a Tolstoyan gallery of characters. It makes a convincing if depressing case that Homo Sovieticus, that unique species created a century ago with the Bolshevik Revolution, did not die out along with the Soviet Union … Many, including Gessen’s characters, hoped for the best, a yearning I often heard expressed as the wish that Russia might finally be on its way to becoming a ‘normal, civilized country.’ The Future Is History is the story of how that hope died. To tell it, Gessen offers up a nonfiction Russian novel of sorts, a sprawling narrative with four main characters and three intellectual protagonists … At its heart, this is a book about the Moscow intelligentsia by one of its own, and Gessen manages to write compellingly about the wonky academic types who tried to understand the seismic changes in their country, while trying to imagine a new one.
