William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
"A masterpiece of narrative scholarship." -- Strobe Talbott - The
New York Review of Books
"A meticulously researched, clear-eyed volume that will undoubtedly
stand for years as the definitive account of the Soviet Union's
last ruler." -- Max Boot - Wall Street Journal
"Masterful.... Taubman intimately portrays an epic tragic hero of
Sophoclean proportion. Gorbachev is likely to be a subject of
interest to future historians for centuries, perhaps millennia." --
Forbes
"A superbly researched story of a politician of such decency as to
seem, in our more pessimistic, darker moment, almost beyond
imagining." -- The New Yorker
"William Taubman's extraordinary new biography, Gorbachev: His
Life and Times, is fly-on-the-wall history.... A riveting
page-turner.... His book is anything but a solemn academic tome.
It's gripping." -- Mark Katkov - NPR
"Superb.... Enlightening.... With great skill [Taubman] lays bare
the evolution that was so important to [Gorbachev's] later
actions." -- David E. Hoffman - The Washington Post
"[Taubman] applies a Tolstoyan lens to Russia's recent history and
displays particular sensitivity in his assessment of a life that
would prove richer than politics." -- The Economist
"I have had the privilege of knowing many of the great men and
women who brought momentous change to the last part of the
twentieth century. My friend Mikhail Gorbachev was outstanding
among them. So this biography, especially with its attention to his
early formative years, is a great addition to our understanding of
a key historical period." -- George P. Shultz
"William Taubman has now done for Gorbachev what he had previously
done for Khrushchev, giving us the full life deeply grounded in the
Soviet and Russian archives, here with the added benefit of
Gorbachev's complete cooperation. Perhaps a hundred years from now,
when our perspective on Russia's role in the world has further
clarified, another biography will be needed. For now, however,
Gorbachev is the closest thing to the final word that
history allows."" -- Joseph Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The
Revolutionary Generation
"Remarkably, the two most memorable leaders of the Soviet Union in
the last half of its existence now have the same superb biographer.
William Taubman's Gorbachev, like his Khrushchev,
is an extraordinary achievement, full of new information, filled
with shrewd judgments, a two-in-a-row triumph in the writing of
great lives." -- John Lewis Gaddis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of George F. Kennan: An American Life
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