RaveThe New York Review of BooksWilliam Taubman’s monumental, long-awaited biography of Nikita Khrushchev is the most important book on Khrushchev to appear in English since the deposed Soviet leader’s own memoirs in 1970. It is rich in analysis and factual detail, shedding new light both on Khrushchev’s life and on the Soviet state ... But for learning about the qualities needed for leadership of a large country, we had better look elsewhere. The more that is revealed about the inner workings of the Soviet Union—and Taubman’s book is a strong contribution to that process of discovery—the more the Soviet system proves to have involved a squandering of people and resources on a scale that is almost impossible to imagine ... Taubman’s exhaustive exploration of a life already well known in its main elements will reinforce the widely held view of Khrushchev as a political failure. Khrushchev’s shortcomings as a politician are chronicled here with a candor that is all the more disarming in view of the author’s sympathy for Khrushchev as a man.
John McPhee
RaveBook PostLike a patchwork quilt it has harmony, if not logic ... If you are new to John McPhee, The Patch is not the right place to begin ... If you are old with McPhee, as I am, The Patch is perfect pleasure ... McPhee’s tone might easily be called conversational, but it is like a conversation with the most interesting person you ever met, and with you the only listener ... This is craft raised to the level of art ... if you would like, for a while at least, to be soothed, and amused, and educated in the most enjoyable way, to be presented with a view of the world that feels both true and reassuring, then be glad that John McPhee is there to provide it. The Patch is a postcard from a gentler place.
Masha Gessen
PositiveThe New York Review of Books...Masha Gessen’s remarkable group portrait of seven Soviet-born Russians whose changing lives embody the changing fortunes and character of their country as it passed from the end of Communist dictatorship under Mikhail Gorbachev to improvised liberalism under Boris Yeltsin and then back to what Gessen sees as renewed totalitarianism under Putin ...deft blending of these stories gives us a fresh view of recent Russian history from within, as it was experienced at the time by its people ... Through the eyes of her characters, Gessen manages to restore those possibilities, to convey how it felt to imagine that life in the new Russia could go in any direction ... She alternately zooms in on the lives of her characters and zooms out to give more general accounts of the major events of the time.
