Where is your nonfiction section please.
It's been a dark few weeks in the world, hasn't it? Everything still feels surreal, and the news brings fresh horrors every day. I try to keep this blog solely book-related, but of course the world doesn't compartmentalize so neatly. It feels worthwhile right now to point people towards some books that can help to... Continue Reading →
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice, by Bill Browderpublished 2015 by Simon & Schuster - Used or new @ SecondSale.com The American-born, now British financier Bill Browder got in on the nascent world of free-market Eastern Europe at the beginning, when, during his work for the... Continue Reading →
Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West, by Catherine Belton (Used or new @ SecondSale.com) You in the West, you think you’re playing chess with us. But you’re never going to win, because we’re not following any rules. Vladimir Putin seemingly came out of the shadows to run... Continue Reading →
Book review: Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist and author Masha Gessen lived through the changes of the Soviet Union, including Putin's ascendancy and increasing control over the state media. Gessen’s reported and written extensively about totalitarianism and the relationship of Putin's Russia with the west. In Surviving Autocracy, Gessen turns this... Continue Reading →
Russians Among Us, by Gordon Corera (Amazon / SecondSale.com) In July 2010, on the tarmac of the Vienna International Airport, the biggest spy swap since the Cold War took place. Ten Russian undercover agents who had been living in the US, some representing a new era in espionage by using their own names instead of... Continue Reading →
Book review: In Putin's Footsteps, by Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler (Amazon / Book Depository) The new stories were no longer those of Yeltsin's Russia, which was perceived, both at home and abroad, as a weak, insignificant, and corrupt bogeyman reeling from its Cold War defeat. These were stories of an enigmatic young technocrat tirelessly... Continue Reading →
Book review: Russian Roulette, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn Amazon Political investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn (the former the chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News and the latter the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones) write a thoroughly researched, detail-driven, and rage-inducing account of relations between Trump family, campaign, and administration with... Continue Reading →
Book review: Collusion, by Luke Harding (Amazon / Book Depository) How to explain Trump’s consistent praise of Putin? In the febrile months leading up to the November 8, 2016 vote, Trump had lambasted not only Clinton and Obama but also his Republican Party rivals, Saturday Night Live, the “failing” New York Times, the U.S. media... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Man Without a Face, by Masha Gessen Amazon / Book Depository "Imagine you have a country and no one to run it. This was the predicament that Boris Yeltsin and his inner circle thought they faced in 1999." What do we really know about Vladimir Putin? What beyond the carefully orchestrated and... Continue Reading →
Book review: Putin Country, by Anne Garrels (Amazon / Book Depository) "When the meteor hit Chelyabinsk, it blazed across the sky, spewed out its shards, and then sank quietly into a lake. That's what many hoped the breakup of the Soviet Union would be like. It would end with a compliant Russia as benign as the rock... Continue Reading →
Book review: Russians, by Gregory Feifer "Russia has no need of sermons (she has heard too many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of the awakening in the people a feeling of human dignity, lost for so many ages in mud and filth." - Vissarion Belinsky on the Russian Orthodox Church in a letter to... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 