Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts
Feb 21, 2019
Nov 8, 2016
Jan 1, 2016
The tiger - John Vaillant
Booklist Reviews
Set in Russia’s Maritime Territory, Vaillant’s story concerns a tiger of the endangered Amur subspecies that killed three hunters in 1997. Expanding from the incidents’ central facts, Vaillant’s narrative explores humans’ relationship with predatory animals in general, with the Amur tiger as the specific example. Literary, folkloric, and scientific sources combine into a deeply sensitive depiction of the tiger’s adaptation to its forested, mountainous, and wintry environment. As he recounts how Russians such as the hunters in question also attempt to extract a living from the taiga, possibly including illegal poaching of the tiger, Vaillant posits the tiger’s thoughts about the competition, inferring its intelligence from a conservation warden’s investigation into the cases of the unfortunate hunters, who were felled in ambush-style attacks. Interest in Vaillant’s work, which climaxes in the warden’s pursuit of the deadly tiger, will partake of humans’ instinctual fear of large carnivores, the modern imperative to preserve them from extinction, and readers of Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce (2005), a positively reviewed, deep-drilling work, also about the nexus between humans and the natural world. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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Sep 8, 2015
Red notice - Bill Browder
Summary: "A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption"--Amazon.com.
A reaHife political thriller about an American-born financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the people responsible in the Kremlin. Bill Browder started out his adult life as the Wall Street maverick whose instincts led him to Russia just after the breakup of the Soviet Union, where he made his fortune. Along the way he exposed corruption, and barely escaped with his life. His Russian lawyer wasn't so lucky: he ended up in jail, where he was tortured to death. That changed Browder forever. He saw the murderous heart of the Putin regime hand has spent the last half decade on a campaign to expose it. Because of this, he became Putin's number one enemy. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.--From publisher description.
Booklist Reviews
Browder was a successful businessman, a pioneering investor in the emerging market that was Russia after the collapse of the Soviet empire. In the 1990s, savvy investors were seeking out his hedge fund as a way to get in on astonishingly undervalued, newly privatized businesses in Russia. But along with privatization came the oligarchs, powerful Russians who took control of previously government-operated entities. After operating successfully for years, Browder ran afoul of the oligarchs and the government. He was suddenly persona non grata, expelled from Russia, leaving his company at the mercy of a tax scam—$230 million in fraud committed by Russian government officials. From London he fought back, with help from Russian colleagues, including an attorney who uncovered the criminal enterprise and was eventually murdered. Browder offers a harrowing tale of corrupt business and political tactics, traceable all the way to President Putin, and the long struggle for justice that could have cost him his life. This is a revealing thriller of Russian financial and political corruption. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Aug 1, 2015
A bear, a backpack, and eight crates of vodka: a memoir - Lev Golinkin
Summary: Recounts the author's experiences as a young boy fleeing persecution in the late eighties Soviet Union, and his later return to Austria and Eastern Europe as an American adult to track down those who helped his family escape and thank them.
Booklist Reviews
Golinkin was just a child during the tumultuous years of Soviet premier Gorbachev's introduction of glasnost and perestroika, yet his parents and grandmother remembered the worst of the USSR's restrictive, controlling atmosphere. Worse, the family members were zhid, Jewish. This atmospheric, touching memoir, whose chapters begin with dates and locations to orient the reader, follows the Golinkins as they escape the Soviet Union and land in America. Golinkin's early memories are touchingly true to those of a youngster, and he reports on his family members' fears, troubles, persistence, and patience with a keen eye and a memorable voice. Once in the U.S., ensconced near Purdue University—the former-engineer father a clerk, the former-doctor mother a barista, and hopes for his sister's attending Purdue wavering—Golinkin muses, "Dignity, family, social status, or blood, one way or another, every immigrant pays the admission price to America, and the older they are, the steeper the fare." Years later, Golinkin finds and thanks the many people who helped his family and inspired him to help others as well. Eye-opening for those who come to the U.S. and for those who help them do so. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Jan 6, 2015
The family Romanov - Candace Fleming
Summary: Traces the story of the Russian Revolution, the lives of the Romanov family, and the story of their tragic deaths, in an account that draws on primary source materials and includes period photography.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* History comes to vivid life in Fleming's sweeping story of the dramatic decline and fall of the House of Romanov. Her account provides not only intimate portraits of Tsar Nicholas; his wife, Alexandra; and the five Romanov children, but it also offers a beautifully realized examination of the context of their lives—Russia in a state of increasing social unrest and turmoil. The latter aspect is shown in part through generous excerpts from letters, diaries, memoirs, and more that are seamlessly interspersed throughout the narrative. All underscore the incredible disparity between the glittering lives of the Romanovs and the desperately impoverished ones of the peasant population. Instead of attempting to reform this, Nicholas simply refused to acknowledge its presence, rousing himself only long enough to order savage repression of the occasional uprising. Fleming shows that the hapless tsar was ill equipped to discharge his duties, increasingly relying on Alexandra for guidance; unfortunately, at the same time, she was increasingly reliant on the counsel of the evil monk Rasputin. The end, when it came, was swift and—for the Romanovs, who were brutally murdered—terrible. Compulsively readable, Fleming's artful work of narrative history is splendidly researched and documented. For readers who regard history as dull, Fleming's extraordinary book is proof positive that, on the contrary, it is endlessly fascinating, absorbing as any novel, and the stuff of an altogether memorable reading experience. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
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Oct 1, 2013
The bloody white baron - James Palmer
Summary: Palmer introduces readers to a little known, and very bizarre, episode of post-Revolutionary Russia and to its main actor, the anti-Semitic and genocidal Baron Ungern-Sternberg. One of the leaders of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, Ungern-Sternberg and his army were pushed by the Bolsheviks into Mongolia, which had recently broken free from China. Conquering the country with cavalry--the last person in history to do such a thing--Ungern-Sternberg established a medieval-style dictatorship, murdering Jews and political opponents in a pogrom that foretold later atrocities by the Nazis. Writing in a popular style, Palmer vividly conveys the details of Ungern-Sternberg's rise to power and his eventual dispatch at the hands of victorious Soviet forces. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) - (Book News)
Booklist Reviews
Well traveled in Mongolia, one of the settings in this fine history of a bizarre episode from the Russian civil war, Palmer recounts the story of Baron Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921). A military leader on the White side of the conflict, Ungern-Sternberg was many things: an ethnic German, an imperial Russian army officer, an anti-Semitic psychopath, and, as ruler of Mongolia in early 1921, a god incarnate to some traditional Mongolians. Finding hints of an unhinged, violent personality in the baron s youth, Palmer recounts its gruesome manifestation in the methods he applied to his area of Siberian operations during the civil war. As the victorious Reds approached in late 1920, Ungern-Sternberg, with several thousand troops, decamped for Mongolia, routed a Chinese force, and proceeded to enact an apocalyptic pogrom. Taking no prisoners and killing Jews out of hand, Ungern-Sternberg was actuated, in addition to innate sadism, by his fascination with Buddhism and the occult; his eccentric beliefs, Palmer suggests, were precursors to Nazism. Soundly researched, Palmer s biography vividly reflects the pitiless extremism of the Russian civil war.
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Aug 1, 2013
Tuva Groove (CD) - Kongar-ol Ondar
Summary: "Throat-singing" by Kongar-ol Ondar a native of Tannu Tuva (Siberia) accompanied by a variety of musicians and instruments. "This project was inspired by Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)... A taste of Feynman's drumming, chanting and storytelling are featured on several tracks." -- Cf. leaflet. Throat-singing is the Tuvan tradition whereby a soloist sings two, three, even four notes at once.
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Oct 1, 2012
The Master & Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Summary: When the devil arrives in 1930s Moscow, consorting with a retinue of odd associates—including a talking black cat, an assassin, and a beautiful naked witch—his antics wreak havoc among the literary elite of the world capital of atheism. Meanwhile, the Master, author of an unpublished novel about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, languishes in despair in a psychiatric hospital, while his devoted lover, Margarita, decides to sell her soul to save him. As Bulgakov’s dazzlingly exuberant narrative weaves back and forth between Moscow and ancient Jerusalem, studded with scenes ranging from a giddy Satanic ball to the murder of Judas in Gethsemane, Margarita’s enduring love for the Master joins the strands of plot across space and time. - (Random House, Inc.)
Reviews
“Fine, funny, imaginative . . . . The Master and Margarita stands squarely in the great Gogolesque tradition of satiric narrative.” —Saul Maloff, Newsweek
“The book is by turns hilarious, mysterious, contemplative and poignant. . . . A great work.” —Chicago Tribune
“Magnificent . . . a gloriously ironic gothic masterpiece . . . had me rapt with bliss.” —Patrick McGrath, Guardian (UK)
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Apr 1, 2011
Moscow 1941 -Rodric Braithwaite
Moscow 1941: a city and its people at war - Braithwaite, Rodric
Summary: A narrative history of the Battle of Moscow interweaves the personal reminiscences of ordinary men and women with portraits of Stalin and his generals to reveal the impact of the war on the daily life of the city's inhabitants. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
The defense of the Soviet capital against the German invasion of 1941 is cast in this history against the ordinary Muscovite's call to arms. Braithwaite, formerly a British ambassador in Moscow in the late 1980s, focuses on firsthand experiences that capture the difficulties of living, both materially and psychologically, in the atmosphere of Stalinism. The German attack produced widespread dread, both for what the Nazis portended and, more immediately, the draconian reintensification of Stalin's terror. The dictator also appealed to patriotism, however, and the author probes the motivations of Moscow's students, workers, artists, and professionals in joining military units, confirming that not everyone signed up under the gun. Personal stories in the dozens fit into Braithwaite's chronicle of the German bid for the capital, which reached Moscow's outskirts and provoked panic before being repulsed at horrendous cost in December 1941. Conversantly connected to his interviewees and to documentary sources, Braithwaite delivers a tragically human Moscow of 1941, victorious but traumatized. ((Reviewed September 1, 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews
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Mar 2, 2011
City of thieves: a novel - David Benioff
Summary: A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won't talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds.
Booklist Reviews
In 1941, the Germans circled Leningrad, starving its remaining citizens. His mother and sister evacuated, 17-year-old Lev Beniov remained, heeding the call for every able-bodied man to come to the defense of his country. After being caught out after curfew, Lev is thrown in the Crosses, the notorious prison, and while waiting for what he assumes will be an inglorious end, a summary execution at dawn, he is joined by the gregarious, indefatigable, and literature-spouting soldier, Kolya, imprisoned for desertion. When their lives are spared, they are assigned the impossible task of acquiring a dozen eggs for the wedding of a colonel's daughter, a task that takes them into the company of cannibals and Einsatzgruppen, dreaded Nazi death squads. A high-spirited adventure, Benioff's second novel (following the 2001 debut, The 25th Hour), ostensibly an account of the author's grandfather—a quiet immigrant who sold his real-estate business and retired to Florida with his wife—takes more than a little poetic license. When Benioff tells his grandfather that a few things don't make sense in the narrative, his reply: "You're a writer. Make it up." Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
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