The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy

In the eight years Bill Clinton was president, as Russia lurched from one crisis to another, each more horrifying than the last, Clinton and his foreign-policy team found they faced no greater task than helping keep Russia stable and at peace with herself and her neighbors. Strobe Talbott's mesmerizing account reveals what a close-run thing this was, and how much the Bush-Putin relationship has been defined by the work of Bill Clinton. Written with a novelistic richness and energy, it is the first great book about war and peace in the post-cold war world. It is also the one book anyone needs to understand Russia's fateful transformation and future possibilities after ten years as a democracy.