Hedrick Smith

If you want a really depressing tour through the growing economic inequality and political stagnation of America over the last four decades, here it is! The transfer of risk to ordinary Americans, and the transfer of reward away from them, has occurred in all kinds of ways, from the destruction of pensions to be replaced by worse-performing 401(k) plans to the destruction of well-paid, longterm jobs. Smith holds out some hope that we can take the country back from the plutocrats in show more charge—but why we’d start now is not entirely clear. show less

Outstanding analysis of what has happened to the American middle class over the past 30 years. The book took me forever to finish because it repeatedly made me so angry I had to keep putting it down. This is a must read. It will tell you what you already know but will make you angry about knowing it.

A better title for this book would be, "The Life and Times of M. S. Gorbachov." It is a political history of the transition years of 1985-1990 and how the Communist Party was forced by economic rot to release its strangle hold on political power. We all know what happened generally during this period; Smith documents the actual debates, the struggle for power, and the step-by-step move away from Stalinism. I particularly appreciated Smith's recording of his interviews with political figures show more and the "man in the street" alike. He is fluent in Russian and has the reporter's eye. Most readers (including me) will get a bit lost with all the names -- kinda like reading Tolstoy. The cast is huge. But the center of it all -- with all his faults and failures -- is Gorbachov himself. He was the catalyst for change; he was also in the right place at the right time. show less

Exhaustive (600+ pages in pb) account of the Gorbachev era in the USSR, with a detailed examination of what he was up against in attempting to turn things around. While Smith is rather sympathetic to Gorbachev (especially in the final chapter), he doesn't shy away from pointing out the numerous errors he made. It's questionable whether any man could really have tackled the job and kept the state going, intact. Personally, I prefer his previous book "The Russians." This was informative, but show more an awfully hard slog. show less