A Challenging and Informative Book of the Week

Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, March 2018.

As I often say, I try to keep politics off my Intentional Living blog, but I also like to post about the books I’m currently reading, and sometimes those two areas overlap. Whatever your political leanings, though, I consider this a book required reading as we move ahead into the unknown territory our country is now traversing. (That sounds a little pompous, I guess. After all, the future is always “unknown territory,” isn’t it?) You may remember that I wrote a post about the Gary Kasparov book Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped awhile ago, a truly frightening book by someone who has lived through the worst that the Putin regime has yet to offer.

For this book, two investigative journalists, David Corn of Mother Jones and Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News teamed up as they did for a previous book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (which I believe I have also read). Isikoff has been on the staff of a number of news outlets over the course of a long career, and, interestingly enough, was the reporter at Newsweek who was going to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal in January 1998. At the last minute the magazine killed the story, and it was instead broken by the Drudge Report. David Corn is now chief of the Washington bureau for the progressive news magazine Mother Jones and has, like Isikoff, had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, appearing on many outlets ranging from Fox News to NPR. So both men have serious investigative chops. They are also excellent writers, and they take on the task of trying to explore the tangled, twisted tale of 1) Donald Trump’s long-standing relationship with Russia in general and specifically with Vladimir Putin (our friend Vlad the Impaler) and 2) Russia’s long-standing attempts to mess with America, specifically with our electoral process. There’s no “smoking gun” as such in the book, in the sense that there are any definitive conclusions drawn as to who did what during the 2016 election campaign. (Jonah Goldberg, one of my biggest faves, has a whole rant in an article about this whole “smoking gun” hoo-ha. Follow the link if you’d like to read it.)

You can be motivated to read this book for any one of several reasons:

1) You’re an American citizen who’d like to know what the Russians are up to;

2) You like spy thrillers and this book reads like one;

3) You like mysteries and this book solves a few.

The book is a challenging read, not through any fault of the authors but because of the story itself. I personally feel as though I grew a whole new set of neurons while listening to it. I won’t say that I didn’t get a little lost in amongst all of the complicated Russian names, but in the end I felt that I had gotten a pretty comprehensive picture. I think many of us who were at least somewhat politically aware at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union thought that everything was hunky-dory when that happened. The world was now safe from the machinations of the Communist bloc! Well, ha.

I accessed this book by way of Audible.com, as I had a credit to my credit. My library system has the book and an audiobook on CD, although there’s somewhat of a holds list. They don’t have it available right now as a downloadable audiobook, but that may change. In the meantime, the authors are being interviewed all over the place; just google “Michael Isikoff and David Corn” an you’ll get a slew of hits. They’re very engaging and funny even while discussing serious topics. Give them a try!

Next week’s book or books will be by Mireille Giuliano, the French Woman–so don’t ever accuse me of a lack of variety in the books I recommend!

The book links in this post are Amazon affiliate links; if you click on the link and purchase the book, or any other item on Amazon, I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.