Dirty Rubles

Dirty Rubles
Author: Greg Olear
Publisher: Four Sticks Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781641849265

Trump/Russia is the greatest political scandal in American history. It's also the most complex. In this remarkable and necessary work, novelist Greg Olear weaves the loose threads of Trump/Russia into a short, easy-to-follow narrative. Dirty Rubles is an ideal primer for those new to the story, a useful review for those already in the know, and a guidebook for the agnostic #MAGA fan--a compelling overview of Trump/Russia that every American should read.

Life

Life
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1048
Release: 1926
Genre: American wit and humor
ISBN:

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol
Author: Yuliya Ilchuk
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487537875

One of the great writers of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine before he was lionized and canonized in Russia. The ambiguities within his subversive, ironic works are matched by those that surround the debate over his national identity. This book presents a completely new assessment of the problem: rather than adopting the predominant "either/or" perspective – wherein Gogol is seen as either Ukrainian or Russian – it shows how his cultural identity was a product of negotiation with imperial and national cultural codes and values. By examining Gogol’s ambivalent self-fashioning, language performance, and textual practices, this book shows how Gogol played with both imperial and local sources of identity and turned his hybridity into a project of subtle cultural resistance. Ilchuk provides a comprehensive account of assimilation and hybridization of Ukrainians in the Russian empire, arguing that Russia’s imperial culture has depended on Ukraine and the participation of Ukrainian intellectuals in its development. Ilchuk also introduces innovative computer-assisted methods of textual analysis to demonstrate the palimpsest-like quality of Gogol’s texts and national identity.

House of Trump, House of Putin

House of Trump, House of Putin
Author: Craig Unger
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1524743526

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.”—The Washington Post House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House. It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin’s long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and Mafia kingpins had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence. To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991—that it merely evolved, with Trump’s apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump’s sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia’s phoenix like rise from the ashes of the post–Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower. Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. This essential book is crucial to understanding the real powers at play in the shadows of today’s world. The appearance of key figures in this book—Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Felix Sater to name a few—ring with haunting significance in the wake of Robert Mueller’s report and as others continue to close in on the truth.

The Turkish Gambit

The Turkish Gambit
Author: Boris Akunin
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2006
Genre: Detective and mystery stories
ISBN: 0812968786

In 1877, Erast Fandorin finds himself at the Bulgarian front in a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, where he assists a Russian woman who is risking her life for her fiancé, who has been falsely accused of espionage.

Atta Boy

Atta Boy
Author: Cally Fiedorek
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2024-04-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1609389425

In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens. Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man. By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines, social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.

The Road to Unfreedom

The Road to Unfreedom
Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0525574484

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America. “A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies. In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.