Gorbachev: His Life and Times - Hardcover

Taubman, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393647013 ISBN 13: 9780393647013

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

Synopsis

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

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 was one of the world’s two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism, and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. 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. 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 Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.

90 illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Review:

“Masterly....[This] richly layered portrait....will surely stand as the definitive English-language chronicle of this most intriguing figure for many years to come.”
- Peter Baker, New York Times Book Review

“A meticulously researched, clear-eyed volume that will undoubtedly stand for years as the definitive account of the Soviet Union's last ruler.”
- Max Boot, Wall Street Journal

“Essential reading for the 21st century.”
- Radhika Jones, New York Times

“Superb....enlightening....with great skill [Taubman] lays bare the evolution that was so important to [Gorbachev’s] later actions.”
- David E. Hoffman, The Washington Post

“Magisterial....William Taubman has written a fascinating, perceptive, and compelling account of the life of a brilliant, driven, but flawed leader.”
- Nick Burns, Boston Globe

“A superbly researched story of a politician of such decency as to seem, in our more pessimistic, darker moment, almost beyond imagining.”
- The New Yorker

“William Taubman's extraordinary new biography, Gorbachev: His Life and Times, is fly-on-the-wall history....A riveting page-turner....his book is anything but a solemn academic tome. It's gripping.”
- Mark Katkov, NPR

“Sympathetic in his judgments yet clear-eyed in his criticisms, Taubman has rendered Gorbachev in a vast and complex portrait that will be the standard for years to come.”
- Michael O'Donnell, Washington Monthly

“[Taubman] applies a Tolstoyan lens to Russia’s recent history and displays particular sensitivity in his assessment of a life that would prove richer than politics.”
- The Economist

“This will be one of the two or three best books of the year, compulsively readable, fun, and informative all at once.”
- Tyler Cowan

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0393647013
• ISBN 13: 9780393647013
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 880