RaveThe Washington TimesBy the time you reach Page 131 of Peter Pomerantsev’s brilliant collection of sketches from the life in 21st century Russia you may find yourself echoing the lament of one of its more sympathetic characters (\'Grigory,\' an unusually bright, relatively cultivated member of the new class of Russian entrepreneur-tycoons): \'There must be some way of working out how to make Russia work. Must be!\' ... Mr. Pomerantsev, with Russian emigre roots and a professional background in television production, is uniquely qualified to describe the results ... Many of Mr. Pomerantsev’s most powerful, moving — and sometimes hilarious — pages are devoted to stories and characters that ended up on the cutting room floor.
Tom Reiss
MixedThe Washington Times...engagingly written — if somewhat overblown ... he is a gifted literary scavenger who specializes in digging up neglected or forgotten minor historical figures and then reintroducing them to contemporary readers. The travel and field research leading up to his books become a sometimes entertaining, sometimes distracting subplot, stretching what might have been an absorbing, factual feature article into a rather rambling book in which the occasional fresh fact is surrounded by conjectures ... Further padding takes the form of entertaining but marginally relevant footnotes that add nothing to the core narrative but give the author a chance to show off his trivia collection ... Nor is The Black Count helped by the blatantly inflated claims made by the author about his hero ... He deserves to be remembered for what he was, not as the mythical figure that his son fantasized and Mr. Reiss has passed on to us in inflated form.
Alan Greenspan
RaveThe Washington TimesMasterful ... Alan remains down-to-earth, extremely articulate and a clear, sharp thinker ... You don’t have to be an economics wonk to enjoy and learn from Capitalism in America. As long as you engage your brain and pay attention, you will find plenty of food for thought in this lucid, accessible potted history of what one might call Capitalism American Style ... Readers — and leaders — seeking a reliable road map to solutions will find many of them in Capitalism in America.
Andrew Friedman
RaveThe Washington Times\"Sane diners trying to figure out how we reached this pitch of culinary madness can find some of the answers in Andrew Friedman’s almost excessively detailed analysis of what an affluent generation of 1970s and 1980s young people who didn’t need to worry about where their own next meal was coming from ended up changing the way thousands of restaurant-goers dine today. Mr. Friedman clearly thinks all this is a good thing, not necessarily for the most commendable of reasons ... readers will find Mr. Friedman a conscientious guide to the seething stockpot that is his subject ... Andrew Friedman’s lengthy, sometimes tedious but often amusing chronicle of their [chefs] moment in the sun will provide a fitting epitaph.\