MixedThe AtlanticThe great achievement of Taubman\'s book is to offer a psychological portrait of Khrushchev, at once highly critical and deeply sympathetic, that captures this mixture. No other work has brought home so vividly just how extraordinary a figure Khrushchev was in the gallery of modern rulers ... told grippingly, with consistently good judgment and a feeling for telling detail. We are given a portrait of rare penetration ... Still, there remains some irreducible mystery in the emergence of this gaudy butterfly from the drabbest chrysalis. It is no fault of Taubman\'s that he seems stumped by it ... Taubman has made good use of the abundant, if highly selective, official reports and transcripts and participant recollections that have been published in Russia over the past decade. But he has not enjoyed much direct access to the archives. He was forced to rely heavily on interviews and worked in close collaboration with Khrushchev\'s family; the shape of his book is thus determined in considerable measure by these sources ... But there is a further reason why Taubman\'s book, for all its merits as a biography, is skewed as a history ... That lies in its starting point, as Taubman candidly describes it. The original concern with Khrushchev\'s U.S. policies has been submerged but not suppressed by the subsequent turn toward his \'life and times\'...
Hilary Spurling
PositiveThe London Review of Books\"Spurling’s own practice as a biographer [have never] been so succinct ... The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the extraordinary union that produced Powell and shaped his infancy ... Spurling’s portrait of Violet Powell – another part of his life, as he often said, that he could never describe – is the second great virtue of her book. Written with an underlying entre femmes warmth and understanding, its stress falls on ‘her extraordinary openness to experience, her voracious hunger for life and the energy she put into it’.\
