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The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Lake Pelosi

‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom

by Marilyn Lake

This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.

 

Recent episodes:

Gorbachev: His life and times by William Taubman

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April 2018, no. 400
Barbara Keys reviews 'Gorbachev: His life and times' by William Taubman

‘Heroes, hero worship, and the heroic in history’: so did one observer describe the essence of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940). A series of portraits of ‘great men’, the book culminates with Lenin’s arrival on a German train at Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917, shortly after the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas ...

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Red Flag Unfurled: History, historians, and the Russian Revolution by Ronald Grigor Suny

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April 2018, no. 400
Sheila Fitzpatrick review 'Red Flag Unfurled: History, historians, and the Russian Revolution' by Ronald Grigor Suny

The centenary of the Russian Revolution has just passed, leaving a rather eerie silence, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia decided not to hold any official commemoration. In the current climate of what has been called a ‘new Cold War’ with Russia, people in the West often forget that the Soviet Union and its communist regime ...

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The Long Hangover: Putin’s new Russia and the ghosts of the past by Shaun Walker

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April 2018, no. 400
Kieran Pender reviews 'The Long Hangover: Putin’s new Russia and the ghosts of the past' by Shaun Walker

Winston Churchill once famously said of Russia: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ The aphorism is still cited regularly today by analysts and commentators confused by the opaque Russian state. Regrettably, the sentences that followed have been largely consigned to history ...

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Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House by Luke Harding

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March 2018, no. 399
Varun Ghosh reviews 'Collusion: How Russia helped Trump win the White House' by Luke Harding

It is now widely believed that Russia and its agents interfered with the 2016 US presidential election to help Donald Trump get elected ...

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The Unwomanly Face of War by by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

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November 2017, no. 396
Miriam Cosic reviews 'The Unwomanly Face of War' by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

When Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in 2015, the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment. Who was she? The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin ...

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Who Lost Russia?: How the world entered a new Cold War by Peter Conradi

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August 2017, no. 393
Iva Glisic reviews 'Who Lost Russia?: How the world entered a new Cold War' by Peter Conradi

Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency has redefined many features of US politics, not the least of which has been the nation’s relationship with its former Cold War nemesis. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ Trump asked while campaigning, ‘if we actually got along with Russia?’

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Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905–1953 by Simon Ings

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April 2017, no. 390
Mark Edele reviews 'Stalin and the Scientists: A History of triumph and tragedy 1905–1953' by Simon Ings

The relationship between science and power is central to many struggles of the present. Politics impinges on science when funding is allocated to ‘applied’ or ‘fundamental’ research, when decisions are reached about what should be taught in schools, when governments determine if people can be forced to vaccinate their children, what kinds of interventions in ...

Return to Moscow by Tony Kevin

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March 2017, no. 389
Nick Hordern reviews 'Return to Moscow' by Tony Kevin

The idea that the world faces a second Cold War started out as hyperbole, but by 2016 it was sounding increasingly plausible. For more than a decade, Moscow, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, had been waging a diplomatic, political, and military campaign to restore Russian power – in the Caucasus, in Ukraine, and in Syria. In the West this has usually been p ...

Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian ballet from the rule of the tsars to today by Simon Morrison

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January–February 2017, no. 388
Lee Christofis reviews 'Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian ballet from the rule of the tsars to today' by Simon Morrison

In November 2016, former principal dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko entered the Bolshoi Ballet studios in Moscow to begin retraining for the stage. He had recently been ...

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The Romanovs: 1613–1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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September 2016, no. 384
Mark Edele reviews 'The Romanovs: 1613-1918' by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The history of (not so) great men and women, their lovers, wars, and marriages is back. After social historians from the 1970s reduced kings and queens to 'clowns in ...

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