This volume, with its brisk, enjoyable narrative, succeeds in every sense: sweep, depth, liveliness, color, tempo. Each chapter shines with mastery and authority. A conscientious biography of a worthy subject cannot help being a portrait of the times, and Taubman's book fully lives up to the ''and his era'' of the subtitle. It is a multifaceted study of the key political and economic forces of the first 47 years -- almost two-thirds of the total -- of the Soviet civilization ... Taubman provides a number of explanations, all plausible and helpful, as clues to Khrushchev's de-Stalinizing impulse, but characteristically he respects the reader and refrains from ex cathedra pronouncements. This is as it should be ... In the end, it is hard to summarize this man better than Taubman does: 'complicit in great evil yet also the author of much good.'

Taubman's book is by far the best and most thorough contribution to understanding Khrushchev's personality and politics ever written, but he is not always as sure-footed in discussing more recent political phenomena ... More fundamentally, Taubman is misleading when, citing as his source an interview he conducted with a leading Russian pollster, he says that 'the only two periods of the 20th century that Russians evaluate positively are those associated with the last tsar, Nicholas II, and Nikita Khrushchev'. The point about such surveys is that they reflect changing views of the present ...

The 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'...

...the biography by William Taubman, a Russian specialist at Amherst College, is the first scholarly study of this Soviet leader based on a thorough examination of all the existing literature as well as the available archival sources and interviews with those who knew him. More than 10 years in the making, this lively narrative is likely to remain for a considerable time the standard study of the man who in 1956 started the de-Stalinization that 35 years later ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its empire.

...[a] tremendous biography ... Taubman, who has studied Khrushchev for most of his working life, was able to read the secret files and Party minutes, and to travel about post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine in search of surviving witnesses and family members. The range of his research, his mastery of sources and his ability to win the confidence of most – not quite all – of the people he tracked down are astounding. As a result, Taubman will make many readers – especially those who have not kept up with the torrent of revelations from the opened Soviet archives in the last ten years – change their understanding of history.

William 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.

Few have written a political biography that better captures both a historic figure and the history of which he was a part. Taubman's towering work is stunning not only for its scale and diligence -- every aspect checked and cross-checked, no source neglected -- but for the skill with which he reconstructs what is essentially a history of Soviet politics during a key phase ... In the retelling, Taubman adds a wealth of behind-the-scenes detail. The book is a gift, as fascinating as it is important.

Taubman has done a masterful job of reminding us not only how complex a man Khrushchev was, but also how much blood he had on his hands, and what a wild ride it was in international relations while he was in power ... In extraordinary detail, Taubman describes Khrushchev as cunning, conniving and freewheeling; a man of stubborn nature and primitive instincts ... Throughout, Taubman makes a great deal of Khrushchev's contradictory instincts and his duality-giving us psychological insights to interpret Khrushchev's most outlandish and barbaric acts, and emphasizing the guilt he carried with him in consequence. He suggests that Khrushchev was both a man bent on personal survival and one possessed by self--deception. After several hundred pages, however, Nikita Khrushchev does not seem as complicated as Taubman suggests. He comes across not only as a master politician during his meteoric rise, but as a master manipulator as well, knowing perfectly well what he was doing while he was doing it.

Amherst College political science professor Taubman's thorough and nuanced account is the first full-length American biography of Khrushchev—and will likely be the definitive one for a long time ... Working closely with Khrushchev's children, and interviewing his surviving top-level Central Committee colleagues and aides, Taubman has pieced together a remarkably detailed chronicle, complete with riveting scenes of Kremlin intrigue and acute psychological analysis that further illuminates some of the nightmarish episodes of Soviet history.