David RemnickResenhas

This book has something for everyone who's interested in food, it's preparation, those who prepare it, origins of certain dishes, and so much more! These food related articles span many years of The New Yorker magazine's publication. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of restaurants and chefs in far off countries and the food they prepared.

The stories cover a broad expanse in time and distance. There are a series of fiction stories at the end of the book and those offered a wide variety as well. I learned much--from the origin of buffalo wings to the practice of creating raw cheeses (by a nun with a Ph.D. in the subject and the world's foremost expert on this subject). The articles on the exotic fruit expert and famed buyer of same, and a reflection on the difference between white and red wine and the concept that often experts can't even tell the difference in blind tests were also quite interesting. Both of those stories had a tie-in to my home state (California), and in the case of the fruit buyer even referred to a family in California (who are kind of produce royalty) which includes (by marriage) a cousin of mine, whose amazing mansion I can still recall visiting as a child.

A thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining read!

Perhaps the best account of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

also gives reader Soviet history, reads like 1984, but all facts

great, how a government is created
one strong AP students found it tedious

Pretty well written and it was interesting to learn about Obama, who I knew little about.
Covers his early life up to his run for president.

Ian Frazier article on beekeeping, maraschino cherries and marijuana -- fascinating.

I've been dipping in an out of this four a couple months now. A frankly amazing collection of authors: Bill Buford, M.F.K. Fisher, A.J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, Roger Angell, Dorothy Parker (!), Malcolm Gladwell, Roald Dahl, and many more. So far almost all hits. But, like some essay collections, hard to take in large doses; an essay a week is about right for me.

In the end a little uneven, but on the whole very satisfying.

very readable nonfiction (history; fall of soviet union). Pulitzer #16.

Este livro oferece o relato até à data mais completo de Obama. Através de longas entrevistas aos amigos e professores, mentores e antipatizantes, familiares e ao próprio Obama, David Remnick permite-nos ver como um jovem confuso, desenraizado e solitário se reinventou – primeiro fazendo trabalho comunitário em Chicago, uma experiência que o motivou para trabalhar na política e lhe deu um lar e uma comunidade – e depois se sentiu impelido a entrar na Escola de Direito de Harvard, onde ganharia um sentido de missão mais abrangente.

I bought this book for the Garrison Keillor! Just kidding. I can't stand Garrison Keillor. I bought it for the Jack Handey.

"I am willing to do these things because I believe that until people can sit around a desert campfire and go 'Shhh, hear that?' and then listen for the plaintive howl of me, we as a society have lost something." -JH

I was going to read the essays on Roseanne and Richard Pryor and call it quits but this whole book is really incredible. Especially and unexpectedly interesting: essays on the Chudnovsky Bros., Anatole Broyard, Ricky Jay, and Heloise. On Anatole Broyard:

"You know, he turned it into a joke. And when you change something basic about yourself into a joke, it spreads, it metastasizes, and so his whole presentation of self became completely ironic. Everything about him was ironic."

Also introduced me to this In Living Color skit which touches some vital nerve for me.

Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election represented not just a milestone in terms of American history, but a new stage in the nation’s enduring struggle over race. It was an issue that Obama had to deal with throughout the campaign, not just from whites but from blacks as well, as he faced charges that he was not “black” enough. In this book David Remnick, the editor of New Yorker magazine, offers us a study of Obama’s life within the context of the issue of race. In it, he addresses not just the issues that he faced over the course of his life, but how in many respects they reflect the broader challenges that African Americans and whites faced in an era of dramatic change in the notions of race and equality within the nation as a whole.

The issue of race emerged early on for Obama. Growing up in Hawai’i, he experienced a very different type of racial environment, one with far greater racial diversity and far less overt animosity, than was the case on the mainland at the time. It was in that unique environment that he first wrestled with the issues of his self-definition, a struggle that continued throughout his college career, first in Los Angeles, then in New York City. By the time he graduated, he was a man comfortable with his own identity and the role he wanted to play within the larger community. Remnick’s account here is traditionally biographical in its scope, drawing considerably upon Obama’s own memoir, [b:Dreams from My Father|88061|Dreams from My Father A Story of Race and Inheritance|Barack Obama|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1352340675s/88061.jpg|86032], but adding to it with the subsequent reporting. He maintains this approach through much of his post-collegiate career, through his time as a community organizer, law school student, and attorney and budding politician. It is with his election to the United States Senate that the focus narrows to the twin issues of Obama’s presidential run and the intertwining of his political aspirations with race.

By the time Remnick reaches the end of his book – with the election of Obama to the White House, he has given readers a well-researched and perceptive look at both Barack Obama’s life and the role of race within it. While not comprehensive, it is one of the best biographies of the 44th president that we are likely to have for some time, and one that subsequent studies will rely upon for the wealth of information it provides. Anyone wishing to learn about Barack Obama would do well to start with this clearly written and dispassionate look at Obama, both for the insights it offers into him and for its analysis of a critical dimension of his life and career.

Very interesting, like a bunch of extended New Yorker "Talk of the town" features. But like those, this can be hit or miss. Occasionally it is tiresome, and occasionally it is brilliant. Remnick doesn't give too much background; he often assumes that you basically know everyone and know the basic events. The selected background he does give I found to be very useful. In the current context of course the stories are a bit dated, but I still found them to be insightful for understanding modern Russian history. I wish Remnick would update the book with his own insights, and how he sees these stories from the current perspective. Probably this has appeared in the New Yorker, to some degree.

> "A friend of mine met Molotov before his death and he told Molotov, 'You know, it's a pity that Lenin died so early. If he had lived longer, everything would have been normal.' But Molotov said, 'Why do you say that?' My friend said, 'Because Stalin was a bloodsucker and Lenin was a noble person.' Molotov smiled, and then he said, 'Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.'"

> On November 2, 1987, at the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses, Gorbachev delivered his speech to a national television audience and the great relics of the Communist world. Erich Honecker of East Germany, Wojciech Jaruzelski of Poland, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Milos Jakes of Czechoslovakia, Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania, Gorbachev's own Central Committee: they were all there to hear what would, and would not, be said about the history of the regime. Soon, all of them would fall to revolution and election—all but Castro—and in large part, the reason was this speech. Bland, hedged, filled with the Communist Party Newspeak imagined by George Orwell and perfected by committees of cowardly men, Gorbachev's speech nevertheless opened the gate. And the lion of history came roaring in.

> What was really incredible in 1988 and 1989 was to ride the subways and see ordinary people reading Pasternak in their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir or the latest historical essays in the red-and-white Znamya. For a couple of years, stokers, drivers, students, everyone consumed this material with an animal hunger. They read all the time, riding up escalators, walking down the streets, reading as if scared that this would all disappear once more into the censor's black box

> By the time she was sixteen and Bukharin was forty-two, she had a terrific crush on him. One day she wrote Bukharin a love letter finally confessing her feelings. As she climbed the stairs to slip the letter under Bukharin's door, she saw Stalin's boots ahead of her. He was clearly headed for Bukharin's room. She gave Stalin the letter and asked him to deliver it; for a moment, at least, one of the great murderers of the twentieth century played mailman for a young girl in love.

> His unerring sense of rightness, like that of scientist-moralists from Galileo to Oppenheimer, was steeped in his understanding of the scientific problems of light and time, his firsthand appreciation of both the laws of the universe and man’s tragic tendency to turn progress into catastrophe. He held in mind, it seemed, a picture, even a music, of eternity. Sakharov once turned to his wife and said, "Do you know what I love most of all in life?" Later, Bonner would confide to a friend, "I expected he would say something about a poem or a sonata or even about me." Instead, Sakharov said, "The thing I love most in life is radio background emanation"—the barely discernible reflection of unknown cosmic processes that ended billions of years ago. … His physics and his politics grew out of the same mind, the same sense of wholeness and responsibility. "Other civilizations, perhaps more successful ones, may exist an infinite number of times on the preceding and following pages of the Book of the Universe," Sakharov wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture. "Yet we should not minimize our sacred endeavors in the world, where, like faint glimmers in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive."

> But with glasnost, the directors grew humble and put up an astonishingly frank display: "The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods." At the exhibit, a long line of Soviets solemnly shuffled past a dazzling display of stunning underachievement: putrid lettuce, ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside. All the items had been purchased in neighborhood stores.

> was suffering from that terrible envy born of years of serfdom under czars and general secretaries, an envy embodied in a classic Soviet joke: A farmer's cow dies, but a great spirit grants him one wish. And what is the wish? "Let my neighbor's cow drop dead, too,"

> When perestroika began, Gorbachev had at least some sense of the deterioration of the national economy and the difficulty of creating semidemocratic politics in a totalitarian state. But he and his colleagues started out nearly oblivious to the nationalities question.

> Major Dronin got to talking about politics, about the "lawlessness" in the country these days. "There will be a dictatorship soon," he said with a certain relish in his voice. "It won’t be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs—the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline." As in Stalin's day? I asked. "No, that was too harsh," he said. "But maybe as it was under Brezhnev or Andropov."

> He and Gorbachev began with the idea of "cleansing" socialism and the Party, but they had precious little idea of how they would do it and where it would all lead. The truth is that Yakovlev, Gorbachev, and Shevardnadze—the lead reformers in the Politburo after Yeltsin resigned in 1987—were flying almost blind, and against a terrific conservative headwind, from the start. "Speaking generally," Yakovlev said, "our baseline principle was that some things could be improved: more democracy, elections, more in the newspapers—limited, but slightly more open—the management system should be improved, centralization should be less strict, power should be redistributed somewhat, maybe the functions of the Party and the government should be divided. But you can find all of these democratic axioms since 1917, even under Stalin. 'Socialist democracy' was talked about as an ideal even then. But speeches are speeches." … Yakovlev's most radical proposal in the early days of power was to dismantle the one-party system. In his secret memo to Gorbachev dated December 1985, Yakovlev suggested as a first step toward the creation of a democratic, multiparty system that the Communist Party be divided into progressives and conservatives. Such a split would acknowledge the obvious: the Party was unified by nothing but its pretenses and camouflage

> the appearance of Stalin was no aberration, but rather the direct result of Lenin's "revolutionary romanticism" that idealized violence as an instrument of class struggle and a force of purification. Until perestroika, even the most radical underground historians in the Soviet Union denied this. … it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the first Europeans to use the term "concentration camp" and then use the device to such effect. Three months after Trotsky used the term, Lenin sent a telegram to the Penza Executive Committee on August 9, 1918, demanding the local Red leaders carry out "ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests, and White Guards; confine all suspicious elements in a concentration camp outside the city."

> I could not get past the fact that he still kept an enormous painting of Lenin hanging behind him. As I was leaving the office, I whispered to an aide, "What's the painting doing there?" He laughed. "Pay it no mind," he said. "We tried to take it down, but we found a huge stain on the wallpaper. We don't have the money for new wallpaper."

> The idea that the individual was of absolute value appeared in Russia only in the nineteenth century via Western influences, but it was stunted because there was no civic society. This is why human rights was never an issue

> He told me that when he first started listening to rock and roll, it was impossible to get records and it was before the era when audio cassettes were easy to find. "We had friends who worked in medical clinics and they would steal used X rays," Kolya said. "Someone would have a primitive record-making machine and you would copy the music by cutting the grooves in the material of the X rays. So you’d be listening to a Fats Domino tune that was coming right off of the X ray of someone's long-forgotten broken hip. They called that 'on the bones.'"

> Most of the men who ran the Kremlin had never been to the West, or when they had been, it was in the "bubble" of an official visit. It was not by chance that the two men who had traveled in the West extensively before coming to power were also the two main figures of official reform: Yakovlev and Gorbachev.

> As opposed to the Catholic Church, which developed its independent structures after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Church was always dependent on the state. The Byzantine emperors presided over all the synods of the church and were considered "God on earth."

> The Gulag Archipelago would never fade from the history of Russian literature or the history of Russia. No single work, including Orwell's novels, did as much to shatter the illusions of the West; no book did more to educate the Soviet people and undermine the regime … Solzhenitsyn did not recognize just how deeply Ukrainians, for example, had come to believe in their own distinctiveness, how much they wanted a capital in Kiev, not Moscow. And, as always, Solzhenitsyn created problems for himself with the pitch of his voice, its hyped-up grandeur.

> On October 15, Gorbachev received the Nobel Prize for Peace. On October 16, after the leaders of the KGB, the police, the army, and the defense industry made it quite clear that they would not tolerate a radical reordering of political and economic power, Gorbachev withdrew his support for the 500 Days plan. Gorbachev had caved in to the people who had everything to lose from the reform of the country. When he did that it was clear to everyone in the Soviet Union that Gorbachev had begun listing to the right. Soon he would reject all the reformers in his team, he would begin to speak, with a sneer, of the "so-called democrats." … While Gorbachev may well have thought he was finessing the hard-liners and playing for time, he was ruining himself forever. The more he attacked Yeltsin and Landsbergis, the more he made cult figures of them. The man who had mastered his own personality and the tactics of the Communist Party now found himself unable to master the new form of politics he had set free. Gorbachev's compromises, his ugly language, betrayed him. A great man now looked weak, mean-spirited, and confused. There he was, in prime time, railing against the "so-called democrats" who got their marching orders from "foreign research centers."

> Victory in the war served to legitimize the brutal collectivization and industrialization campaigns that went before it. Although these men no longer celebrated Stalin, at least not in public, their view of history was surely Stalinist.

> You know there were many people, especially young officers of the KGB, who thought liberally because they had more information than anyone else. That's why there have always been a lot of thinking people in the KGB, people who understand the West as it really is and what our own country really was

> Weaving in and out of the convoy and racing up and down the columns, we saw an amazing display of joy. The armies of Napoleon, Hitler, and other would-be conquerors of Moscow had time and again fled Russia in despair and defeat. These soldiers were retreating in relief and sheer pleasure, as if they had won the victory of an age.

> Even after he returned from captivity to Moscow following the fall of the August coup, Gorbachev defended the Communist Party. He was its son, its protector, and he would neither abandon nor kill it. At his first press conference after the putsch, Gorbachev spoke earnestly about his allegiance to the "socialist choice" and the Party's "renewal."

> Much of the old regime survived. The smartest of the Communist Party men had long ago hired themselves out as "biznesmeny" and "konsultanty."

> The mere mention of a trial was revolutionary, for one of the fundamental principles of the Bolsheviks had been to deny the primacy of civil law. Constitutions were written, celebrated in the pages of Pravda, and ignored: the Party was above the law. Or as Lenin put it in 1918, the dictatorship of the proletariat "is unrestricted by law." Within months of taking power, Lenin liquidated the fragile legal system that had been in place since the czarist reforms of 1864 and commenced a system of state terror that was designed to intimidate the population and ensure the survival of the regime. "We must execute not only the guilty," Lenin's commissar of justice, Nikolai Krylenko, said. "Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."

Eine beeindruckender Blick in das frühe Leben von Muhammad Ali. Interessante Einblicke aber auch in die Biographien von Liston nd Patterson. Lesenswert, wenn man wissen möchte, was den größten Boxer aller Zeiten in seinen frühen Jahren angetrieben hat.½

Este libro es una verdadera joya del periodismo narrativo. La prosa de Remnick es tan orgánica que a veces te da la impresión de estar leyendo una muy buena novela. Remnick trata a las figuras históricas de su libro con tanta fidelidad y compasión que cuesta no conmoverse ante la humanidad de Patterson, Liston, Dundee, Malcom X, Alí.
Más que la crónica del ascenso a la fama de Cassius Clay, después Muhammad Alí ("Clay era mi apellido de esclavo") y su conquista del mundo, este libro parece ser una radiografía exhaustiva de los sesentas norteamericanos.

My and I were driving to Columbus, OH in 2007 for a work seminar for her new job. We heard about Boris Yeltsin's death on NPR. The palace coup, Yeltsin's dancing on TV and the two Chechnyean wars occupied the next stretch of our drive. I found this book in a shop in Columbus a few days later and snatched it on the spot.

Remnick approaches his subject with an even hand. There is no Western arrogance about matters. When he discovers fault, he reports it.

I remember when Yeltsin resigned. I was going to a fancy soiree w/ some friends for New Years (don't ask) There was no way in 1999 one could predict the steely constictions of the Putin Imperium. Remnick's book offers a sober nudge to all predictions concerning Russian politics. The same can be said for political animals from almost every other land as well.

It was an easy and interesting read about how the popular view changed regarding the party and communism in the decades leading up to the fall of the USSR. He made some prescient predictions about the KGB maintaining power after all was said and done. I wonder how well his interpretation of events holds up with the current historical approach to the era. If you are interested in the transitional period of Russia, then you will enjoy this book.½

I took my time with this one and dipped in and out over the course of several months. Some incredibly great gems of food writing within, by Joseph Mitchell, A. J. Liebling, Anthony Bourdain, M. F. K. Fisher, John McPhee, John Seabrook, and Roald Dahl, among others.

DNF. just can't get into it at this length. There are bits that certainly are LOL but not enough. So many pieces are funny for only a paragraph, and then the joke is over.

There were a couple of frustrating items on promising topics: one on how hunter-gatherers had it better, which we all know but probably also all love thinking about, but that had nothing new to say on the topic; one on accidental killers that was kind of ditto (but probably there is little art to be spun out of hitting a kid in your car in the confines of the form, hand it over to the right novelist instead, maybe a Clarice Lispector?), and one on the Kellogg–Briand pact that suggests it's to be credited for the drop in violence since the forties but doesn't really make a clear case why, and then a good one about the current North Korea situation that helps us understand just how it is that the two sides can know so little about each other, and a good story about an old lady with dementia who tries to drop her grandson off the balcony by Edwidge Danticat, and other things.

I have read about ten of the short essays and none of them seem very funny thus confirmation of my bigotry that Americans are too unsophisticated to handle difficult spellings or humour!

Wow, this has to be one of my favorite all-time sports biographies. The prose is pure butter: elegant, but also smooth and riveting. One does not need to be knowledgeable about the sport of boxing, nor a particular fan of boxing, to find this book entertaining and enlightening.

This book covers Ali's childhood through his Patterson/Liston fights. The book starts out by describing Patterson's and Liston's tough childhoods, and their rise to fame in the chaotic boxing world. Both of these opponents go on to play significant roles in Ali's life, and both left indelible marks on Ali's career.

Ali's was a product of his time. His membership in the Nation of Islam, his friendship, and then estrangement to Malcolm X, his refusal to be drafted in Vietnam, his scathing lip, all clearly defined Ali during his early days.

I admire Ali. His refusal to being drafted was an inspiration to many African Americans. During this time, there was talk of getting Ali a cushy non-combat job, but he still refused. He paid a dear price for his recalcitrance - a forfeiture of his title, and millions of dollars in revenue from prospective fights/endorsements. In addition, his refusal came before the war lost support at home, and Ali's reputation suffered as a well. He was a man of convictions and I find the honorable and courageous.

This book isn't a hagiography. Ali was far from perfect; he was completely human. While Martin Luther King Jr was fighting for integration and equality, Ali joined the militant, separatist sect of the Nation Of Islam. For some, their behavior was a set back to progress made by King and others. Ali also disowned Malcolm X after Malcolm X fell out of favor with the Nation of Islam. Later in life, Ali himself admitted he regretted that situation. Ali also had a very turbulent relationship was his first wife, which ended in divorce over her refusal to dress as a proper Muslim woman, even though she didn't adhere to that code to begin with. Also, Ali's treatment of Patterson during their follow up fight after the two Liston fights, in my view, was a low blow.

To his credit, Ali's views evolved as he aged. And he left a strong legacy in the sport, political, and religious realms. He also ultimately helped moved forward Civil Rights for African Americans by his political stands, his unwavering confidence in himself, and his example of a successful, strong, independent minority. His persona in interviews, his poetry, his confidence, are all very charming intricacies of his personality. I never found those intricacies arrogant. I think most of it was an act to mess with his opponent. It also was a brillaint marketing move. Ultimately, it's classic Ali.

I also found this book sad. Both Patterson and Liston had tough childhoods. Both had limited access to education. Ultimately, Liston's life came to a tragic, possibly drug overdosed, end. For boxers, this was a common refrain. Boxing was the one thing that could propel them out of poverty and desolation. After boxing, many ended up with severe brain damage; dementia and confusion are common symptoms of too many blows to head. For ones who made a ton of money, there is at least a small consolation of security. But for the majority of boxers, poverty and waywardness awaited them post boxing.

I recommend this book. It's more than a small slice of Muhammad Ali's life. Its more than exciting title fights. It's a look into the turbulent 60's and of men finding their way.

This was an amusing New Yorker with a piece on the history of Coachella and some other stuff but the main thing I found striking was how in the extensive piece about Margeret Atwood (through the lens of the "handmaid's tale in the age of Trump") the whole thing about how she's been excoriated lately by many of my comrades on the Left for her role in l'affair Galloway (basically, UBC writing prof accused of probably sexual assault and certainly really really uncool behaviour by his students, Canadian literati step up to defend him, people weigh in basically along the lines of "star chamber!" v. "I believe women," and Joseph Boyden, who was a former like celeb First Nations writer who turns out maybe not to have been so First Nations after all, and Atwood take most of the brunt because they are the progressive darlings and doyen/nes and it is sharper than a serpent's tooth etc.) got not a whisper of a mention even though it's like for me I'm sure 90% of my thoughts about Margaret Atwood lately (even in the age of Trump) have been in relation to it, and how (and I don't mean to dismiss the seriousness of these concerns, I think I am mostly in agreement with the people who feel betrayed here though perhaps not 100 100 percent though of course there is no such percent agreement among those other people too it just appears that way due to the human instinct toward performative ideological purity and the distorting effect of social media) the talk of the town in one town (Canadatown) can evidently be a tempest in the tiniest of teacups in another.½

Here I was all excited to settle in with this New Yorker hot take on the Donald Trump–Putin–hacking–fate of Russia since 1991 connection and it turns out I already read it online. You fucked me, the New Yorker! Or maybe the Internet.

Good pieces in here. Some of the early ones run together since they all seem to be about French chefs, gourmands, and restaurants. The fiction is great: Cheever, Erdrich, Delillo. John McPhee's essay on foraging is probably the best. It is McPhee.