Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A masterpiece of narrative scholarship." -- Strobe Talbott - The New York Review of Books
"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
"Masterful.… Taubman intimately portrays an epic tragic hero of Sophoclean proportion. Gorbachev is likely to be a subject of interest to future historians for centuries, perhaps millennia." -- Forbes
"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
"Superb.… Enlightening.…With great skill [Taubman] lays bare the evolution that was so important to [Gorbachev’s] later actions." -- David E. Hoffman - Washington Post
"[A] deeply penetrating history and engrossing psychological study, Taubman draws on a wide range of sources and interviews…to render every major development of the former Soviet leader’s six-year tenure with depth and completeness." -- Robert Legvold - Foreign Affairs
"[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
"William Taubman has now done for Gorbachev what he had previously done for Khrushchev, giving us the full life deeply grounded in the Soviet and Russian archives, here with the added benefit of Gorbachev’s complete cooperation. Perhaps a hundred years from now, when our perspective on Russia’s role in the world has further clarified, another biography will be needed. For now, however,
Gorbachev is the closest thing to the final word that history allows." -- Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783
"Remarkably, the two most memorable leaders of the Soviet Union in the last half of its existence now have the same superb biographer. 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 in the writing of great lives." -- John Lewis Gaddis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of George F. Kennan: An American Life
"I have had the privilege of knowing many of the great men and women who brought momentous change to the last part of the twentieth century. My friend Mikhail Gorbachev was outstanding among them. So this biography, especially with its attention to his early formative years, is a great addition to our understanding of a key historical period." -- George P. Shultz
