Memorable and alarming, this book will force you to think hard about the ecological issues threatening the survival of our planet, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, and the sinister ramifications of political theatrics. Pizan has burned Joan's story into her skin-it's the very story we are reading, and it's how we come to learn about Joan's life. Our narrator and heroine-if we can call her that since she is mostly without gender-Christine Pizan is the wife of the soon to be executed Trinculo Forsythe, who created CIEL.
The privileged ruling classes have fled the now radio-active "dying ball of dirt" Earth and have regrouped on a floating station known as CIEL, ruled by Empire Leader Jean de Men, who defeated the young rebel Joan in an earlier battle. With her post-apocalyptic reimagining of Joan of Arc in The Book of Joan, Yuknavitch proves that she can make futuristic fiction as radical, raw, and inventive as her realist works. Startup is obviously written by someone on the inside: Shafrir has written for Wired and is the senior culture writer at BuzzFeed News, and her skill at capturing the world of crack-of-dawn juice-fueled raves before work and debaucherous SXSW pilgrimages, while exposing our collective obsession with technology, is a much-needed reflection on our time. When some secret and salacious info goes public, each has to work out the cost of being Internet famous. Techie bro Mack McAllister, founder of the mindfulness app TakeOff, is nervous about his second round of funding journalist Katya Pasternack is on the lookout for the next viral story sensation and Sabrina Chloe Blum, mother of two and TakeOff's unlikely social media manager, is trying to get a handle on what TWF and LOL mean. The "manifesting" and "crushing it" in Shafrir's savvy and satirical novel about startup culture will have you grinning and groaning in recognition at the antics of her tech-obsessed cast of characters. The caller was indeed Putin, and she took the meeting.) All this is to say: There is no better person to help us understand the complexities of the Russian story, and how it’s shaping world politics and American democracy. Shortly afterward, she received a phone call from a man claiming to be Putin requesting an in-person meeting at the Kremlin.
(As an aside, when Gessen was the editor of Vokrug Sveta, a popular-science magazine, she was fired for refusing to send a reporter to cover Putin’s hang-glider flight with endangered Siberian cranes. Gessen, herself, was forced to move to America during this time. Now she shifts perspective and focuses on the lives of seven characters affected by political crackdown of 2012. In her previous acclaimed biography of Putin, Man Without a Face, she targeted the leader of the totalitarian regime. Winner of the 2017 National Book Award in Non-Fiction, Gessen’s latest juggernaut of a book about her native homeland of Russia examines Vladimir Putin’s rogue mafia state.
Riverhead The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
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