“To grasp the reality of Russia,” writes David Satter, “it is necessary to accept that Russian leaders really are capable of blowing up hundreds of their own people to preserve their hold on power. They really are capable of ordering an attack with flamethrowers on a gymnasium full of defenseless parents and children.” The Less You Know the Better You Sleep is an uncompromising account of Russia’s failed democracy and the birth of a criminal state. An American journalist and historian, who had written extensively on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Satter witnessed the end of Yeltsin’s era and beginning of Putin’s. Well documented and written with narrative tension, the book raises important issues. Refusal to believe that the Kremlin was capable of murdering their own citizens made western policy towards Russia “naive and ineffectual. From the moment Putin took power, the West maintained an image of Russia that bore no relation to reality.” Although published in 2016, The Less You Know the Better You Sleep remains a vital reading for our time. It emphasizes Russia’s disregard for the value of human life and establishes a pattern of the country’s crimes and impunity.
Once you accept that the impossible is really possible, what happens in Russia makes perfect sense
"A few pages into David Satter's truly terrifying book, one realizes that his title is smack-on accurate: modern Russia is a frightening member of the world community to an extent of which most persons are blissfully unaware."-Joseph C. Goulden, Washington Times
"Satter . . . persuasively supplies evidence for his claim that a series of residential bombings in 1999 were part of an elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin, who used them as a smoke screen to invade Chechnya and catapult himself…
I enjoyed Alberto Moravia’s descriptive style and vivid detail that create an illusion of reality; I was also impressed with his psychologically convincing characters. A brilliant anti-fascist novel, The Conformist is the story of a man who becomes a secret police collaborator under Mussolini. Marchello volunteers his services to the state to “normalize” the crime he thinks he committed as a boy. He is a weak man who clings to the fascists for strength. Marchello’s mission is simple, but only on the surface: during his honeymoon in Paris, he has to meet his former professor, an anti-fascist, and confirm his identity to the Italian secret agents. Since Professor Quadri is a hunchback and is living openly in Paris, Marchello’s task is a mere test of loyalty to the regime. On a deeper level, the mission tests Marchello as a human being. Is he capable of betraying his teacher, like Judas? He entertains the parable in his mind and decides that his betrayal is different since it doesn’t involve money. When Marchello offers extra information on Quadri’s travel plans, this eases the work of the secret police. Unexpectedly for everyone involved, Quadri’s wife travels in the same car. The double killing of the hunchback professor and his bi-sexual wife symbolizes what fascism worked to annihilate. When a counterorder arrives from Italy cancelling the contract murder, it’s already late, the couple is dead. Years later, after the fall of Mussolini, Marchello, a married man, comforts his wife with platitudes he doesn’t believe in: he had no choice, he was a mere soldier following orders. But the order to kill was cancelled; he has no justification for his crime. The epilogue contains beautiful scenes of overturned dictatorship and celebrations in Rome, and also lays bare the author’s message. Marchello drives to the mountains with his wife and daughter expecting to live in obscurity until the search for fascist collaborators is over. The trip ends abruptly when on a mountain road the family is caught in Allied air raids. The deaths of Marchello’s wife and daughter are punishment, in equal measure, for the murder of two innocents in Paris. (Marchello is wounded; he lies on the road as another airplane approaches to finish him off.) Retribution that would unlikely happen in life literally comes from heaven. (In Genesis: “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed…”) There is another way to understand the epilogue: the conformist can leave no legacy. Even so, I found the ending somewhat artificial: here the author clearly imposes his will on characters.
SECRECY AND SILENCE are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open -…
An enjoyable, well written book by a successful man who, starting in his early 20s, built bustling restaurants in New York (the initial three – jointly with his first wife); he even directed two films. Then came his strokes that left him half-paralyzed… He tells his life story with self-deprecating irony and wisdom.
The entertaining, irreverent, and surprisingly moving memoir by the visionary restaurateur behind such iconic New York institutions as Balthazar and Pastis.
A memoir by the legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi, taking us from his gritty London childhood in the fifties to his serendipitous arrival in New York, where he founded the era-defining establishments the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, and Nell’s. Eloquent and opinionated, Keith McNally writes about the angst of being a child actor, his lack of insights from traveling overland to Kathmandu at nineteen,…
The wives of Russia's most celebrated authors were profoundly absorbed with their husbands' art, becoming veritable "nursemaids of talent," as Sophia Tolstoy was described during the writing of War and Peace. Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were their husbands’ muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable advisers. These marriages were marked by intense collaboration: the women contributed ideas and committed to paper great works as stenographers, typists, editors, researchers, translators, and publishers.
