'Gorbachev' Is A Gripping, Sympathetic And Detailed Portrait
In Gorbachev: His Life and Times, biographer William Taubman makes a convincing case that the former Soviet leader's decency — the word appears throughout the book — is key to understanding him.
Mark Katkov is an editor at NPR. He was the CBS News Moscow Bureau producer during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years.
William Taubman's extraordinary new biography, , is fly-on-the-wall history. Taubman — a political scientist at Amherst College — immersed himself in Russian and Soviet archives, memoirs and diaries. The result is an almost day-by-day, even hour-by-hour account of the one of the last century's great dramas: The Soviet Union's fitful move to democracy and ultimate collapse, told in the first
