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Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Livers (Univ. of Texas, Austin) convincingly argues that "Russia is one of the most prolific producers and consumers of conspiracy stories.” In the introduction Livers juxtaposes American and Russian collective paranoias, explaining their similarities/differences, and he revisits this intriguing theme in the conclusion, "Mr. Putin and Comrade Trump." In the book's four chapters Livers engages with Viktor Pelevin’s novels, characterizing them as variations on “post-paranoid” narrative structures and innovatively paraphrasing the idea that Western rationality’s quest for truth is ultimately a doomed project; Aleksandr Prokhanov’s prose, exposing “a vast Russophobic conspiracy … to destroy the Russian state, its people, and … its civilizational uniqueness” (p. 12); Timur Bekmambetov’s cinematic duology Night Watch and Day Watch (2004, 2006)—a thinly veiled allusion to the power game between the Soviet and post-Soviet elites—portraying ordinary Muscovites as “little more than potential collateral damage in the intra-clan struggles” (p. 37); and, finally, the assembly of miscellaneous “conspiracemes" (Pussy Riot—Punk Prayer, 2013, probably the most famous among them), allegedly instigated by the perfidious West “with the aim of unsettling the very foundations of Russian statehood,” namely the Orthodox Church. If Andrew Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive (1996) is correct one must conclude, after reading this meticulously researched book, that Mother Russia is immortal. Wither Brzezinski! Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Peter Steiner, emeritus, University of Pennsylvania