About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Peter Pomerantsev
Positive The Guardian (UK) Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an entertaining if at times bleak chronicle of these years, depicting a world \'where gangsters become artists, gold‑diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints\'. The cast of characters is so bizarre they must be real, from bearded nationalist bikers to self-help cultists and their supermodel victims ... This mercurial quality is part of what makes Putinism so elusive for its opponents – what exactly are they up against? – and Pomerantsev captures it well ... For Pomerantsev, the west’s willingness to accept the Russian elite’s money is the ominous sign of a \'slow patient co-optation\' by the Kremlin. But one could equally argue the opposite: that many of the features he describes – the glamour and the graft, the vast gulf between haves and have-nots – are lingering symptoms of Russia’s own integration into a globalised neoliberal order, and that its many failings hold up a funhouse mirror to our own.
Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna
Pan London Review of Books The Shining Path draws on an enormous archive ... The result of all this legwork should have been an authoritative account of the Sendero insurgency, but Starn and La Serna’s narrative is often clumsy and is strewn with errors. They show little interest in reasons or context, focusing instead on the personalities at the center of the drama ... On the rare occasions Starn and La Serna do venture some kind of analysis or argument, it tends to devolve into tired Cold War clichés ... a full reckoning—let alone a reconciliation—remains elusive.
Gabriel García Márquez
Mixed The Nation Long overdue, it provides a fairly representative slice of García Márquez’s journalistic output ... While it captures the geographical breadth of García Márquez’s journalistic work, the book makes some significant omissions that tend to downplay his radical politics. The result is to give us a somewhat truncated view of a writer who told an interviewer in 1978 that \'there is no act in my life which is not a political act\' ... contains two later pieces devoted to Cuba, which retrospectively convey his enthusiasm for the carnival atmosphere of the revolution’s early stages as well as Márquez’s keen eye for detail ... It is striking that this period of heightened creativity and political activity gets so little space in The Scandal of the Century. Though the ’70s take up almost an entire volume of his collected journalism in Spanish and spill over into another one, here we are given only two pieces on Cuba ... Though lively and often entertaining, these tend to be slighter pieces and are much less politically engaged. Still, there are flashes of telling detail.
Yuri Slezkine
Rave The Nation In his colossal new book, The House of Government, Slezkine has turned this metaphor inside out, using the real history of a single building and its residents as a guide to understanding the triumph and tragedy of the Russian Revolution ...is often fascinating, moving, and profound, but also at times exasperatingly excessive ...he mined a wealth of sources, from state archives to personal diaries, letters, and memoirs. Throughout, he often lets the residents speak for themselves, reproducing long verbatim quotations from their correspondence or private journals ...an in-depth anthropological study, a cascade of conversations with the dead ... The dominant, and most successful, book-within-the-book unearths and retells the stories of the House of Government and its residents ...offers a distinctive angle on the Stalin era, a kind of social history of the 'mass elite.'
Mikhail Zygar
Mixed Bookforum Written in a rather flat but accessible style, the book is based on the testimony of an impressive selection of key figures in contemporary Russian politics ... Zygar's is a conventional enough account of the past fifteen years of Russia's history, albeit one enlivened by some unusual details ... Given the challenge Zygar presents to the standard image of Putin as puppet master, it's ironic that he should then offer no credible sense of who or what might be pulling the strings instead. This crucial bigger picture is what's missing from Zygar's book.