Books: November 2023

Arabesques — Anton Shammas

⭐⭐ There are beautiful moments in this book. A memorable description of his family eating lentils and everyone seeing the bugs in the food. But writers and poets can be so self-involved and willing to ruminate endlessly that it feels like a slog at times. The sequences in Iowa were tedious.

Putin: His Life and Times — Philip Short

⭐⭐⭐ The start is impressive in its detail but at some point the original sources seem to disappear and you get a view of Putin from very far away. I still learned a lot. The standout moments were: 1) seeing the collapse through Putin and his generation’s eyes; 2) the scale of the terror emanating from Chechnya, which I had no sense for; 3) the importance of NATO intervention in Kosovo from the Russian perspective.

The book has been criticized for being overly sympathetic to Putin, and towards the end I tended to agree. Everything seemed too neat, where Putin just wanted to cooperate but the US wouldn’t have it. A fresh perspective is fine, but the author seems to have a strong stance against the interventionist wing of American foreign policy that colors how he views Putin’s actions quite a bit.