Previous installments of This Week in Reading can be found here. Most recently: Books That Should Be Banned.
I read two terrifying books this week, gang. One was about Vladimir Putin, and the other was about a traveling posse of polyester-wearing ex-humans who feed off the steam released by torturing psychic children. I’m not even done the latter yet, but why let that stop me from talking about it?
Let’s start with Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Oh, man. You should already be reading this book. Let me make this abundantly clear: it is not boring. It is basically a Tom Clancy novel but real and by a woman and about Vladimir Putin, who should be in jail. If you have any hesitation about buying a biography of a foreign head of state, the Vanity Fair article that resulted in Gessen’s book should allay those concerns. She’s a clear and entertaining writer, and she is incapable of stepping back from her subject, which could really screw the pooch, but doesn’t. What it does, instead, is remind you that she is writing a living history. She’s mad and frustrated and intermittently hopeful and has enough dead journalist friends to be very conscious of the skin she has in the game.
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