PositivePop MattersMikics recognizes Kubrick\'s ethnoreligious background as crucial to his development as a filmmaker, but he also foregrounds many other influences: his early career as a photographer, his years spent methodically seeing every movie shown in his Bronx neighbourhood, his voracious appetite for literature, and his love of chess ... At times the book reads like less of a traditional biography than a chronological, biographically-centered study of Kubrick\'s films. Each film Kubrick worked on is dealt with in turn, including a detailed account of production and an extended commentary on the film\'s themes ... Mikics\' judgements on some of the films are utterly different from my own ... At other times it feels as though Mikics\' evident admiration for Kubrick can cloud his judgements ... Mikics\' readings of the films are never dry or bogged down with academic terminology. They are sensitive to the fact that while Kubrick\'s films are the product of a singleminded vision, that vision is collaboratively realised.
Erika Fatland
PositivePopMatters... offers an opportunity for sustained reflection on the region ... Despite the title, Fatland is careful to position the Central Asian countries as more than just post-Soviet ... There are many memorable anecdotes and vivid portraits of the people [Fatland] meets ... highlights what an ethnic mosaic the region is ... It is to Fatland\'s credit that she eschews many of the clichés of Post-Soviet travel writing. Invoking ruins has, since the end of the Soviet Union, become something of a platitude in writing about the region. Ruins do feature in Sovietistan, but Fatland draws our attention to remnants of much older civilizations ... The potted histories that are interspersed throughout Fatland\'s anecdotes add another layer to the book. Brief but enlightening summaries of the Great Game, the Silk Road, and Central Asia\'s many contributions to the Islamic Golden Age give context to Fatland\'s journey and hammer home the fact that places such as Merv, perhaps unfamiliar and obscure-seeming to many Anglophone readers, were once of vital importance; teeming centres of learning and trade ... what is so refreshing about Fatland is her predilection for deliberate moments of bathos and deconstruction ... Fatland never comes across as sneering, as travel writers often can, just amused and occasionally exasperated.
Katya Cengel
PanPopMatters[Cengel] skips over the redolent notion of a time between propaganda and fake news and leans much more heavily on personal recollections and observations. Cengel was in Ukraine for some key events in the country\'s recent history...However, the narrative drifts away from these events almost as soon as it alights upon them ... [Cengel\'s] characterization of her co-workers and interviewees often grates ... More incriminatingly, however, is when Cengel feels that an elderly Jewish GULAG survivor is becoming a little too controlling about how his story is told ... There are memorable sketches of Cengel\'s brief trips to Moldova and Transnistria, which are rare English-language accounts of those places during the window of time Cengel outlines. As when Cengel tells us about the news stories she covered, these accounts are over just as they were getting started. The reader is plunged back into the details of her personal life ... rarely foregrounds the voices of others, and rarely gives the reader insights into the cultures of Latvia and Ukraine ... Even Chernobyl, though it features prominently in the book\'s title, is only briefly covered ... Ultimately, From Chernobyl With Love is more illuminating of the American mindset than it is of Latvia and Ukraine, two nations for which the prefix \'post-Soviet\' tells only part of their complex stories.
