Synopsis
Handpicked as a successor by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies.
As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute-and absolutely corrupt-power has the makings of a classic of narrative nonfiction.
About Masha Gessen
See more books from this AuthorGessen’s “Man Without a Face” is altogether different: part psychological profile, part conspiracy study.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from NY TimesA dogged researcher, she has written a brave book, demolishing the numerous myths and legends that have accumulated around her subject.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from Guardian...clear, brave book makes a strong case that Putin is not merely turning a blind eye to embezzlement and skimming. He is, she asserts, an arch-practitioner.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from Guardian..Ms. Gessen has shown remarkable courage in researching and writing this unflinching indictment of the most powerful man in Russia.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from WSJ onlineShe does not so much write his biography as seek to destroy the hagiography others have created.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from Financial TimesBut, contrary to the publicity surrounding the book, it is not full of startling new revelations. And the author ...places herself so much in the narrative...
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from Globe and Mail...a well-known journalist in Moscow, is especially interesting on Mr Putin's time working for the mayor of St Petersburg amid the chaos of the early 1990s.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U... | See more reviews from The Economist...underlines Putin's propensity for crude humour throughout her courageous, enlightening account of his rise to power.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Gessen's epilogue is a worthy conclusion to a book that is part-personal memoir, part-political and social history and part-polemic...
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, provides a compelling and exhaustive portrait of a man who rose without trace from being a minor KGB and St Petersburg bureaucrat...
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...The conspiracies that Gessen chronicles will seem shocking and baroque to some. To others, they will be dimly familiar...
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Gessen’s book does not attempt to weigh up Putin’s record but rather examines his biography, mind-set and methods.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Her book, although focused on Putin and his rise to power, is at heart a description of this secret police milieu.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...This makes for fascinating, hard-hitting reading but scarcely inspires a sense of scrupulous objectivity -- not when...Gessen opts for a sinister explanation that leads back to Putin.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...In this book, written in English but with Russian heart, Gessen focuses on the places and institutions that bred the nation's most resolute leader since Stalin, whose reputation Putin has tried to rehabilitate.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Gessen knows a lot about St Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, and one of the many virtues of her tough, angry biography is that it is not in any way Moscow-centric.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Gessen focuses on the trajectory of a postwar Soviet boy growing up in a shabby communal flat, fierce and vengeful in street fights, who dreams of joining the KGB.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Gessen sees Putin as a man driven by control and vengeance, not ideology.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U......in her brave and valuable portrait of the less seemly aspects of Putin in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, posits that the man he has become in power is the man he was all along.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U......uniformly impresses with her criticism of her subject, steadily slinging mud but backing it up with enough credible fact and insightful analysis to make it stick.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...Her recent book, The Man Without a Face, is as smart and evocative a thriller as any, except Gessen’s book also happens to be true.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...In this lively account of Putin’s rise to power, Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist living in Moscow, believes change in Russia is imminent.
Read Full Review of The Man Without a Face: The U...An aggregated and normalized score based on 298 user ratings from iDreamBooks & iTunes
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