Gorbachev: His Life and Times
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.71 (534 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393647013 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 880 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-12-30 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. . His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts
Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel. The definitive biography of the transformational world leader by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Khrushchev.When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save. was one of the world’s two superpowers. In the first comprehensive biography of the final Soviet leader, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy became the Soviet system’s gravedigger, how he clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, how he found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and how he permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Throughout, Taubman portrays the many sides of Gorbachev’s unique character that, by Gorbachev’s own admission, make him “difficult to understand.” Was he in fact a truly great leader, or was he brought low in the end by his own shortcomings, as well as by the unyielding forces he faced?Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russ
The history of the USSR and the world would have been far different if Mikhail Gorbachev had not come to power.” - Susan Eisenhower“A rich and revealing portrait and a thoroughly engrossing read, Taubman’s penetrating examination of Gorbachev’s rise and fall undermines the argument that Russia can be ruled only by dictators and autocrats--while also exposing how steeply the odds are stacked against any efforts at real reform.” - John Beyrle, Former U.S. William Taubman's Gorbachev, like his Khrushchev, is an extraordinary achievement, full of new information, filled with shrewd judgments, a two-in-a-row triumph i