Author: Maggie Nelson
Rating: 3 Stars
Review By: Shana

Upon finishing this book, I was and remain quite conflicted in how I feel about it. The writing itself is evocative and interesting. The subject matter is clearly serious and compelling - a sort of wandering exploration of how a murder impacts a family, the course of a trial, how certain events intersected with the author's life at the time. But the writing itself, though evocative and interesting, sometimes feels overwrought.

Author: Luke Harding​
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

​This 2016 book, unfortunately, remains all too relevant and has a ripped from the headlines feel. Harding not only recounts (with all materials available at the time of printing) the events that lead up to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in particular, but more generally looks at the events that have shaped Russia under Vladimir Putin. This includes a truncated explanation of the fall of the USSR and the birth of Russia, how the assets that used to belong to the state were divvied up among the Oligarchs, the failure of any nascent democracy in Russia, Putin's improbable rise and eventual consolidation of power, and workings and tenor of present-day Russia under Putin.