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John Kampfner's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books John Kampfner recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of John Kampfner's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Thing Around Your Neck

In these twelve dazzling stories, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—acclaimed author of Half of a Yellow Sun—explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. less
Recommended by John Kampfner, and 1 others.

John KampfnerThis is an extremely evocative book. Chimamanda, a young Nigerian author who has spent some time in America and some time in England, did a previous novel on the Biafran war. But this is a beautiful set of short stories on what it is like for young immigrants to experience democracy, warts and all, for the first time, and to negotiate these new freedoms. It’s a very personalised journey through... (Source)

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2
From one of the most influential journalists of the last half century, an essential explanation and defense of a foundational American idea: free speech

More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America's culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.


In Freedom for...
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Recommended by John Kampfner, and 1 others.

John KampfnerThe last two books are about America. The Anthony Lewis book is a history of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which is a subject of endless fascination with me. At Index on Censorship we have been fighting hard for freedom of speech and freedom of the press since the autumn, when we published our proposals for changing English libel law to stop libel tourists using the courts here.... (Source)

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3
Russian history is first and foremost a history of personalized power. As Russia startles the international community with its assertiveness and faces both parliamentary and presidential elections, Lilia Shevtsova searches the histories of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes. She explores within them conventional truths and myths about Russia, paradoxes of Russian political development, and Russia's role in the world. Russia—Lost in Transition discovers a logic of government in Russia—a political regime and the type of capitalism that were formulated during the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies and... more
Recommended by John Kampfner, and 1 others.

John KampfnerLilia Shevtsova is fascinating on this. She is a great democrat, who works for the Carnegie Endowment, which exists quite happily in Russia. She traces the reasons behind Yeltsin-style pseudo-democracy and the rise of Putin-style authoritarianism. A lot of it can be attributed to the second election in 1996, which Yeltsin effectively gerrymandered and bought the election. Some of the great TV... (Source)

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4

Yeltsin

A Political Life

Even after his death in April 2007, Boris Yeltsin remains the most controversial figure in recent Russian history. Although Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the decline of the Communist party and the withdrawal of Soviet control over eastern Europe, it was Yeltsin-Russia’s first elected president-who buried the Soviet Union itself. Upon taking office, Yeltsin quickly embarked on a sweeping makeover of newly democratic Russia, beginning with a program of excruciatingly painful market reforms that earned him wide acclaim in the West and deep recrimination from many Russian citizens. In...
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Recommended by John Kampfner, and 1 others.

John KampfnerYes, that is the fascinating angle of this account by Timothy Colton. He had amazing access as a journalist and academic to Yeltsin and his entourage, his daughter and his daughter’s husband. In the years before Yeltsin stood down, they ran the Kremlin like this tsarist fiefdom. I lived in Russia from 1990 to 1994 and I was there during the most exciting parts of the collapse of communism and the... (Source)

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5
Recommended by John Kampfner, and 1 others.

John KampfnerIt is a matter of endless fascination for Indians and for Chinese and for others like myself to ask the great Chindia question: to what extent are these two countries similar and to what extent are they very different? Aiyar is a young Indian foreign correspondent based in Beijing. For me, it was fascinating to get a perspective on China from a non-Anglo Saxon and non-European perspective, yet... (Source)

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