wahistorian's Reviews (506)

This was not the snowy gothic mystery I expected. Instead, it was all jangling nerves and miserable couples in a sanatorium rehabbed as a monstrous and soulless luxury hotel. Ugh.

Josephine Tey was fascinated by people who are not what they seem; these three tales feature scheming schoolgirls, twins and impostors, and young women driven by ambition. The subtitle could be “watch out for young people,” and you could interpret these as responses to a postwar world in which youth were overturning long-held traditions, with all the moral and ethical conundrums that go along with that upheaval. ‘Miss Pym Disposes’ successfully recreates the world of a girls’ school; mystery doesn’t come into it until 2/3 of the way through, but the creation of their world is still compelling. In ‘Brat Farrah,’ the heir to Latchetts comes back from the dead—we know he’s an impostor from the beginning, but who else knows and what will they do about it? This one’s a slow burn and it’s the characters and relationships that keep you reading. I struggled a bit more with ‘The Franchise Affair,’ kind of a baggy story with less-than-compelling characters. Out of the blue, a teenaged girl accuses two elderly ladies of unspeakable crimes against her and the community takes up arms when the prosecutor finds insufficient evidence for a trial. An interesting idea that looks at the responsibility of police and the newspaper in meting out justice, but somehow it doesn’t quite gel. Still, Tey at her best.

Svetlana Alexievich has done a heroic job of compiling what are essentially oral histories of Russians who witnessed the end of the Soviet Union. These are people from all walks of life many of whom also lived through WWII and various political loosening and tightening, depending on what group had control of the levers of power. You cannot help but marvel at Russians’ ability to embrace contradictions and to want to love their country in spite of the brutality and corruption and deprivation they have suffered at the hands of their own government and other Russians. Dr. Margarita Pogrebitskaya puts it this way: “You have to ask how these things coexisted: our happiness and the fact that they came for some people at night and took them away… Some people disappeared, while others cried behind the door. For some reason, I don’t remember any of that” (99). This book doesn’t attempt to make sense of any of that and it’s polyphonic style can be confusing for someone not well versed in Russian history. But maybe confusion is the point.

I enjoy P. D. James and her detective, Adam Dalgleish, but this one wasn’t my favorite. Maybe a bit too much personal story—Dalgleish married? No. And the plot seemed a bit all over the place, without fully taking advantage of its potentially spooky setting in a manor house-clinic in the Dorset countryside, complete with standing stones. The story begins with investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn’s determination to finally have plastic surgery on a terrible scar on her face in her 40s—we learn how it happened, learn a bit about her career, and her close associates. But once the surgery is complete, very early on, the story loses its way a bit. We’re presented with a cascade of characters, a little superficially drawn, and the crime is resolved quickly in the last 30 pages or so. I won’t give up on P. D. James, but wish I’d given this one a miss.

I must have read this book when I was 12 or 13 the first time and I remember it made a huge impression on me, its anger and passion and pain. Now I’m impressed that this 30-year-old had the self-insight to simultaneously blame the Beatles and Paul McCartney for the harrowing eight or nine years he’s just closed the chapter on *and* to realize that he was also full of shit. He was angry that no one accepted Yoko, who had rescued him from his own self-loathing and anxiety. He was angry at all the hangers-on who wanted to take full credit for the Beatles’ success. And he was exasperated at his own shyness and anxiety and aggression. But he was also full of remarkable insights about art and music, too. On putting the Beatles together: “Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had—obviously—or not? To make the group stronger or let me be stronger? That decision was to let Paul in to make the *group* stronger” (133). “I read that Malcom X or Eldridge Cleaver or somebody said that, with rock, the blacks gave the middle-class whites back their bodies, put their minds and bodies to it…. It was the only thing that could get through to me of all the things that were happening when I was fifteen” (76). If only Lennon had lived to be part of that nice old couple “off the coast of Ireland, looking at our scrapbook of madness” (151).

A gut-wrenching read about the rise of fascism in England and the ways in which individuals are crushing under the capricious ways of authoritarianism. A cautionary tale for Trump partisans: be careful what you wish for.

As a British film and TV producer of Russian descent, Peter Pomerantsev was perfectly positioned to observe the rise—and the rules—of Putin’s Russia. The effect of this book is kaleidoscopic and a little disorienting as he interviews oligarchs and small-time criminals, international models, young men hiding from military service, biker gangs, and cult leaders, all while trying to figure out how to pitch film projects acceptable to the country’s propaganda-oriented television networks. The result is a crazy quilt of Russians’ self-delusion and lawless ambition, sort of an extreme parody of globalist capitalism harnessed for aggrandizement of Putin and his cronies. The average Russian cannot help but be complicit in the system, Pomerantsev concludes, because there are no alternatives. “This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends,” he insists, and state-controlled television is one of the keys (42). “The Kremlin has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great, 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times can become infectious” (231). Hence the need for Putin’s February 2022 “special military action” to protect the Russian people from Ukraine’s alleged fascism and genocide. Still, Pomerantsev does cite the ways some Russians see through these illusions, even if there’s not much they can do about it. “Everyone who grew up in the Soviet Union had a moment when they woke up,” he writes about his mother and her generation. “As she began to look at the world around her, she slowly saw how everyone was pretending, was faking belief, was being one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon. But scared, too” (198).

I loved this book because of Taylor’s irreverent (yet still kind) writing style. The book is mostly a non-chronological account of Taylor’s career, with some Beatles sprinkled in, yet somehow you feel as if you’ve learned a lot about a lot of people and a lot about the time. What Beatles accounts there are are very behind-the-scenes, like the account of waiting at Apple with bated breath while police searched George’s home for drugs, trying to figure out how to help from a distance. Given his closeness with the four musicians, especially George, he provides glancing insights into their characters and those of other Apple Corps members, but without seeming to trade on the relationships, which, after a decade with the Beatles, he clearly hated. Of John Lennon, he says, with some wonder, that it dawned on him that “John’s only concern was for Yoko and for no one else.” “If John heard that everyone at Apple had been killed in a fire,” Taylor reports, “his mind would turn immediately to the inconvenience of replacing them,” all the more puzzling because “John was such a kind man” (167). He also observed that he never hated anyone as much as he hated Paul McCartney in the summer of 1968, but he shares no other details. Derek Taylor died at age 65, which is really a shame, because there were probably few men as generous, self-effacing, and human as he seemed to be.

Belton’s book systematically traces Putin’s rise to power, from KGB chief in Dresden to deputy mayor of St. Petersburg to Yeltsin protege to Russian President. But, more importantly, it is the story of how Putin’s cronies—KGB and corrupt oligarchs—have taken over the Russian economy, courts, and government to put the entirely in the service of Putin’s personal aims. Based in many interviews with former Putin intimates, the book traces the step-by-step state takeover of Russian gas and oil, creating a black slush fund at Putin’s disposal and destroying any semblance of independence on the part of Russian’s largest industry *and* any hope of the kind of open society that Gorbachev and Yeltsin aspired to. Gradually, the Russian state was completely aligned with the president’s desire to recreate himself as a tsar and Russia as an empire. The book closes with KGB meddling in the 2016 election and in Trump’s Ukraine policy, not to mention attempting to remake Europe in ways sympathetic to Russia. Belton is never alarmist, but the future she lays out is terrifying.

I never needed this book more: the story of two lost artists who found one another and tried to inspire the world to believe in peace and love and kindness, in spite of the fact that—except in one another—they found very little of it from the world. Still, they persisted and together they had the courage to keep on with their work and their message. We were lucky to have them.