Review: On My Country and the World
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200005500113 |
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Thomas Nichols |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
that
was
necessary
for
a
career
in
the
public
eye
-
or
was
it
inherent?
How
did
such
an
aloof
person manage to
inspire
such affection
from
the
public?
Morris
fails
to
consider
these
issues
adequately.
Finally,
the
book
suffers
from the
author's
self-centredness.
Morris's
decision
to
write
his fictional
self
into
the
narrative
is
presumptuous
and maddeningly
distracting.
Even
when
the
narrative
is
not
explicitly
about
Morris,
his feelings
and
thoughts
are
the subject
of
much
atten-
tion.
The author
is
frequently
in
the way
of
the
subject.
Consequently,
it
often
seems
as
though
this
is
a
book
about
a
man
writing
a
biogra-
phy,
rather
than
a
book about
Ronald
Reagan's
life
story.
Beth
Fischer/University
of
Toronto
ON
MY
COUNTRY
AND
THE
WORLD
Mikhail
Gorbachev
New
York:
Columbia
University
Press,
2000,
300
pp,
us$29.95,
ISBN
0-231-115148
Mikhail
Gorbachev's
first
set
of
memoirs,
released
in
1996,
was a
dis-
appointment. They
were
plodding
and
dull,
replete
with
the
minutiae
of
various
forgotten
Central Committee
meetings
that
were
of
little
interest
once the
USSR
was
gone.
But
for
the
scholar
of
Soviet
politics
and
history,
they
were
even
more
flawed
because
they
were
not
even
accurate:
participants
in
some
of
the
events
Gorbachev
described
(American
Ambassador
Jack
Matlock
among
them)
emerged to con-
test
his
recollections.
It
was, in
sum,
a
volume
that
took
many
hun-
dreds
of
pages
to
reveal
very
little
information.
Gorbachev's new
book,
On
My
Country
and
the
World,
is
shorter
but
no
better,
and
in
many
ways
it
is
much
worse.
There
are
no surprises
or
new revelations;
indeed,
the
most
noteworthy
feature
of
this
book
is
that
it
makes
plain
that,
even
now,
Gorbachev
still
does
not
under-
stand
the
country
he
led
or
his
own
role
in
destroying
it.
In
this
most
recent
attempt
to
rehabilitate
his
reputation,
Gorbachev
has
resorted
to
pretentious
and
at
times
even
pedantic
prose (there
is
liberal
use,
for
example,
of
italics
to
underscore
even
the
most
simple
ideas),
and
to
even
greater
disingenuousness
in
recounting
the
major
events
of
his
time
in office.
For
anyone
familiar
with
Gorbachev
and
his
actions
in
the
late
1980s, there
will
be
a
certain
unease
in
reading
this
unfortu-
nately elliptical
account that
veers
from
unbecoming
self-pity
to
unde-
niable
deception.
152
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Winter
1999-2000
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