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Recent Reviews
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Rave The Wall Street Journal Tells the story of humanity through families, be they large or small, powerful or weak, rich or poor. It is a book for people who want to read about people. There’s little attention paid to impersonal forces ... Pulsates with the hundreds of human stories Mr. Montefiore brings to life in vivid, convincing fashion ... [An] ambitious project ... [A] truly global perspective ... The relentless chronological march of Mr. Montefiore’s book is leavened, and given an aspect of suspense, by his habit of picking up the family stories of significant individuals long before they take center stage .
Antony Beevor
Positive The Wall Street Journal ... does not break any new ground or offer any new perspective, and it fits squarely within the latest historiography. He gives scant attention to the causes that led to the February Revolution in 1917, dispatching the reign of Nicholas II in fewer than 20 pages ... focuses less on the politics of these years than on the military aspects of the conflict, which ought to be expected given Mr. Beevor’s expertise. Readers seeking a broader treatment would do well to read Laura Engelstein’s Russia in Flames (2018), but for the story of the warfare that bloodied the lands of the former Russian empire one can do no better than Mr. Beevor’s Russia. The various armies, domestic and foreign, the ever-shifting fronts, the savage battles, the parade of striking personalities—all are recounted here in riveting, and at times revolting, detail ... There is a wealth of new information here that adds considerable texture and nuance to his story and helps to set Russia apart from previous works.
Lucy Ward
Rave The Times Literary Supplement (UK) As Catherine sought to set an example, so does Lucy Ward: her lively and informative book is an unmistakable product of the current pandemic, throughout which misinformation, fear and bogus science have hampered efforts to slow the disease and save lives. Ward would have us follow the example of Russia’s great empress. It’s hard to argue with that.
Helen Rappaport
Positive Wall Street Journal Ms. Rappaport’s treatment of the various writers who ended up in Paris is one of her book’s many strengths. She writes with sensitivity of Gazdanov, Nina Berberova, Teffi, and especially Ivan Bunin, one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1933, and the voice for Russia Abroad. Few of these names are remembered, and even fewer, unfortunately, are still read, but After the Romanovs brings them marvelously back to life.
Helen Rappaport
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books Few historians are better prepared to clear away the fog of confusion, error, and self-serving dishonesty that has kept these questions unanswered for so long than Helen Rappaport, one of today’s leading experts on the last Romanovs. Rappaport has dug deeply in archives around the world and uncovered a wealth of new information that is certain to make The Race to Save the Romanovs the definitive work on the subject ... The story is both fascinating and tragic, but it certainly was no race. Quite the opposite, in fact, as Rappaport herself acknowledges. If universally hated at home, the Romanovs were not exactly popular abroad either ... Rappaport does away with the mistaken notion that it was all somehow King George’s fault ... excellent.
Barnes Carr
Mixed Los Angeles Review of Books The story of American intervention in the Russian Civil War is well known and has been told many times before. Journalist and author Barnes Carr would have us believe, however, that there is much we still don’t know about this history, which he purports to reveal in The Lenin Plot: The Untold Story of America’s Midnight War Against Russia . The administration of President Woodrow Wilson, he writes, launched a secret operation together with Britain and France to topple the fledgling Soviet state and then assassinate Lenin and other top officials. The story Carr recounts is dramatic, but it’s not new ... This pattern recurs throughout the book: tantalizing hints of grand and nefarious American plots are dropped along the way to keep the reader in suspense, only later to be dispelled as mirages. In short, there’s a good deal of heat in Carr’s book, but precious little light ... What’s more, The Lenin Plot is littered with errors, inaccuracies, and misstatements.
Joshua Yaffa
Positive The Wall Street Journal ...a fascinating and nuanced account that illuminates the myriad conflicting and often contradictory forces that have shaped the Russia of today ... The stories here reveal attitudes toward power and personal responsibility that stretch far back in Russia’s past. It is not a matter of oppressor and oppressed; the state has long existed in relation to the citizenry as an \'omnipresent force,\' to quote Mr. Yaffa. He notes that Russians treat \'the Putin state as a given—neither good nor bad, but simply there, like an element in the earth’s atmosphere.\' Since the state cannot be changed or defeated, it has been \'to your advantage to guess what it wanted from you, and to deliver that while also being clever enough to extract some benefit for yourself.\' In such a game, few people come out unscathed.
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
Positive The Wall Street Journal Popoff tells Grossman’s story with sensitivity and a keen understanding of his world, drawing on little-known archival collections to produce what must be considered the definitive biography. Throughout she highlights Grossman’s resistance to the twin totalitarian evils of his time—Nazism and Stalinism—and the defense of human freedom that animates all his writing ... Although Grossman’s epic can’t match the artistry of Tolstoy, Stalingrad is a profoundly moving homage to the millions of victims of the last century.
Helen Rappaport
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Rappaport has dug deeply in archives around the world and uncovered a wealth of new information that is certain to make The Race to Save the Romanovs the definitive work on the subject. The story is both fascinating and tragic ... Rappaport does away with the mistaken notion that it was all somehow King George’s fault ... Now, thanks to her excellent book, she has put to rest the fallacy that any one person could have saved the last Romanovs, either from the Bolsheviks or from themselves.
Victor Sebestyen
Rave The Wall Street Journal ...an accessible, fair and marvelously written biography that reinforces what we have learned in the past three decades ... For anyone interested in an introduction to the world’s greatest revolutionary that draws on the latest research, Mr. Sebestyen’s Lenin would be the place to start ... there’s little about Lenin’s writings or his theories in Mr. Sebestyen’s book. This is very much an intimate portrait, squarely focused on Lenin the man.
Anne Applebaum
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books The definitive history of Stalin’s famine that leaves no doubt about the regime’s role not only in creating the conditions that led to mass starvation, but also in taking advantage of the chaos to crush Ukrainian nationhood … Drawing on a wealth of archival documents and newly published studies, Applebaum, in careful, measured steps, shows just how the famine unfolded and was then used for a range of repressive actions against what a paranoid Stalin believed to be counterrevolutionary nationalists, fifth column traitors, and assorted class enemies and 'former people' (i.e., déclassé aristocrats, bourgeois, clergy, et cetera) plotting to subvert the Soviet Union and win Ukrainian independence.
Simon Morrison
Rave The Wall Street Journal ...[a] masterful book ... it offers a rich, fascinating and nuanced examination of the role of the arts in Russian history ... Mr. Morrison recounts this struggle between art and politics, with all its depressing collateral damage, to great effect.
Amor Towles
Mixed The Wall Street Journal ...[an] entertaining yet flawed new novel ... The novel buzzes with the energy of numerous adventures, love affairs, twists of fate and silly antics. Mr. Towles never bores, and he keeps the pace going at a brisk clip ... The author’s light, waggish style suited the café society of Rules of Civility, but Stalin’s Soviet Union is another matter, and this is where his novel fails...Mr. Towles’s novel misses the pulse of Soviet life, and he writes about matters as if one could just as easily be referring to Paris or Rome.