I know this was something new for this author and I have read Winter Palace, that is why I was a bit disappointed with this one. This book seams rushed, almost like the author did not want to take the time to really develop either the story or the characters. Because of the light development it does not hold your attention. I just did not believe the characters. I kept waiting for it to get better which is why I toughed it out to the end, but I was disappointed overall.

Moving out of Cold War images into a new space of intrigue, revolution and counter-revolution, the kidnapping of Gorbachev while on U.S. soil begins a thriller which traverses Poland, Russia, France and the Eastern U.S. in a gripping, quickpaced story that incorporates former spy drama concepts as background and intoduces problems that only new alliances can solve. Excellent pace; many subplots; fine integration and an immediacy and urgency that engages you totally. An excellent read.

A very good review of this book was written by Tatyana Tolstaya - you can find it in her collections of essays entitles "Pushkin's Children". After reading it, I can't wait to read Sheehy's book - just to enjoy all the fallacies of it (e.g. Sheehy's referring to Tatar-Mongols as two separate groups).

Pgs 190-192 trace history's military leaders and their attitudes(the Greek & Roman societies "Alexander the Great",England's Wellington,the East's Genghis Khan,how the Alexandrian-Wellington style endured in the Western world well into the 20th century...also Britain's Churchill,America's President Eisenhower(Allied Victories in Europe),Russia's Stalin's "Great Patriotic War",America's President John Kennedy's (his own naval heroism) & how he tried to demonastrate his mettle in the "Bay of Pigs Invasion",President Ronald Regan invasion of a tiny Carribbean Island,Britain's Margaret Thatcher used the Falkland war to prove women leaders could be tough as male leaders,President George Bush(41st President) & the fact that his approval ratings soared for his conduct of foreign policy for 6 wks after he had dispatched the largest post-Vietnam War military deployment since World War II to Saudi Arabia to face off Saddam Hussein...Besides the many black and white photos in this historical biography by Gail Sheehy of Gorbachev (who the pages prior to the Epilogue (pg 191)have facing off with President George Bush (41st President) where President Bush reminds him as he accuses the United States of not being sensitive to the death of millions of Soviet citizens during WW2,that of the two of them only he,Bush had actually fought in the war...The book mentions he was seen as a 'top cop' at home from 1985-1990 due to his anti-alcohol and anti-corruption campaigns...with a very courageous picture of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (3" x 5") on the inserts before Pg 211 having a squirrel eating out of the palm of his hand.

The telling of the story itself is not as interesting as the man himself. It is told very objectively, and if you want a well-written biography of a dancer, I suggest Bernard Taper's "Balanchine." But Smakov's telling suffices to portray the life of Latvia-born Barshynikov, who defected from the Communist USSR to become one of the greatest dancers of all time, dancing for American Ballet Theater initially, then, yearning for a chance to work with George Balanchine, switching to New York City Ballet. The book itself is a bit dated, seeing as it has no account of Barshnikov's founding of the White Oak Dance Project, which thrives today as a monumental collaboration of the some of the best modern dancers around today.

Written at a time when the "Gorbachev is a target" plot was still a possibility, Counterstrike isn't Flannery's best work. It is, however, a nice thrill ride with some disturbing parts. The assassin Daniel Moran is somewhat demented, as he wants to carry out his plan just because he spent so much time on it. True he gets a little cartoonishly insane but overall Counterstrike is a good book. If you find a copy, get it and see.

El libro del historiador y teólogo ruso Michail Posnov, es una muy valiosa herramienta para los estudiosos de la historia del cristianismo. La más importante particularidad de este texto es su original y profunda utilización de las fuentes históricas.

The most interesting feature of this book, is that is was published in 1988, when Gorbachev was still in power, and Yeltsin only the man who had just been removed out of his office by Gorbachev. It's a wonderful frozen piece of time.

On the whole this book has all the characteristics of a pre-glasnost biography, and as such it is far from "intimate", even though the subtitle claims to be just that. There are gaps in the chronology, and especially in the depth of the life description. And because of that, the book lacks tension and fascination, that an intimate biography of the head of state of a complex, and foreign, Russian society could have. Gorbachev is depicted as a fairly decent man, who becomes secretary general because of his qualities and the some what ill defined possibility of a power game. At one points there is the suggestion that perhaps to get into the top job Gorbachev had to do some less than commendable things, but that remains vague, and second guessing, much as the rest of the book, unfortunately.

I found this account of life on a collective farm totally boring. The only reason I can see for reading it is to experience a good example of what socialist realism can do to writing. The story and characters did not engage my interest. After reading this novel, I felt as bleak as the life it describes.

This novel is the sequel to "Virgin Soil Upturned", extending the story of collectivisation in the Don community of Gremyachy Log. As in "Virgin Soil Upturned", the chairman of the collective farm, Siemion Davidov, struggles to keep collectivisation on course in the face of the diffident attitudes of many of the workers and outright opposition of counter-revolutionaries.

Sholokhov continues many of the themes he explored in "Virgin Soil Upturned", and the characters are mainly the same. However, I found "Harvest of the Don" a less satisfying read. It's difficult to say why, because all the elements which made "Virgin Soil Upturned" interesting are there in this novel. The main problem, I thought, was that Sholokhov got the mixture of themes wrong, falling into the trap of recounting rural anecdotes and other humerous stories at considerable length. The result is that my attention was diverted from what should have been the main themes of the novel, and I found that the pace of the narrative was very uneven.

I thought that at the end, Sholokhov in part recognised this "fault" by attempting to quicken the pace of the novel and provide a dramatic end. It did not make up for the rest of the writing though. This is a pity - while not actually disliking this novel, I was disappointed.

This is a sequel of another epic novel, Virgin Soil Upturned. The lowdown about this novel is that the author was the favorite of the Soviet Communist Party (pitted against the likes of other Nobel prize winners Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak) and the subject matter SOUNDS boring: the collectivization of farming among Don Cossacks during the early history of the Soviet era.

But like all other great minds, Sholokhov is an aberration: despite being a true blue card-carrying member of the Central Committee and despite the seemingly boring subject, he is genuinely a first-class talent that to me is truly superior to Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and approaches the likes of Turgenev and Gogol.

The pacing and humour of his narrative is similar to Dostoevsky -- fast and interesting, unlike Tolstoy who can be boring and didactic. Characterization and local color however is Tolstoyan: you can really recognize even the individual horses and the dogs, and the description of the peasantry and the countryside reminds one of the pastoral passages in Tolstoy.

The gritty and unflinching realism is very honest and peculiarly modern, but always in the best tradition of grand Russian novels: sweeping, panoramic, and places the reader right in the center of the whirlwind of events and emotions.

Gorbachev writes in a condemning way about the conspirators. However he writes in too shallow of logic and vague language about what brought the Soviet Union to those circumstances. What becomes clear is that he remains a socialist and believes in democracy, but his arguments are made in such feel-good language that one would think that he is still a politician.

Booker states that apart from his PhD in English Lit he has also written over a hundered articles on nuclear physics and electronics, which is enough to make you spew. Given that I have been theorising on the Menippea for the last four years, I find Booker's approach a little facile... his approach to "defining" Flann O"Brien as a menippean satirist amounts to ticking off the elements that correspond to Bakhtin's hit-list. He also makes no mention of Kirk's Bibliography, which is a glaring omission. Overall, a poor effort, from someone who obviously regards themselves as an egghead intellect. (Why do Americans continually abbreviate their first names to initials? from D. Bruce Musgrave

_Mikhail Vrubel_, published by Aurora Arts, Leningrad, is an impressive 9 1/2" by 13", 259-page folio. It offers a comprehensive coverage of Vrubel's works, and could serve as an excellent introduction of this remarkable, yet little known Russian artist to the Western arts connoisseur. A few major drawbacks, however, prevent the book from accomplishing this purpose. The introduction, authored by a distinguished art historian, Dr. Mikhail Guerman, would be unintelligible to anyone who is not conversant in Russian art and literature, as it overflows with cultural references. Yet more alarming is the obscenely poor quality of the reproductions, as anyone who has ever had a chance to view the originals would immediately know. This poor quality prevents one from appreciating Vrubel's most remarkable feature: his obsession with detail, the almost mosaic quality of his paintings. Needless to say, those already familiar with Vrubel's work would also want to avoid this unjustifiably highly-priced volume.