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Arguably no modern political figure is more notorious than Vladimir Putin, and Accidental Czar offers a concise and clear portrait of this complicated man. Diving in with a violent anecdote from Putin’s past, Weiss proceeds to break down the myths by dissecting Putin’s perceived failures and grievances, while offering historic insight into why this adversarial figure has risen to power and held onto it. Weiss begins and ends the book by warning about the mythical status of Putin portrayed and then elevated by the media; though he thoroughly explains how Putin exploited this, there are few concrete examples of it in the text, which perhaps hinders the overall message and point. Regardless, those looking to know more about this figure and his motivations surrounding the conflict in Ukraine will benefit from Weiss’ insider understanding. With a deceptively simple design and a color palette that mirrors cold war artwork and propaganda posters, Brown’s artwork adds significantly to the text, providing nearly every sentence with some sort of illustration and subsequently breaking up the complicated political science and history surrounding the subject.

Publishers Weekly
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Weiss, a Russia analyst and former White House adviser, and cartoonist Brown (Child Star) shred Vladimir Putin’s hypermasculine persona in this witty and incisive graphic biography. The Putin of these pages is less of a mastermind and more of a man constantly on the defensive and ruled by paranoia, whose attempts at fomenting discord occasionally grant him short-term advantages. Focusing on the constant political maneuvering behind Putin’s ascension from low-level KGB bureaucrat in the 1980s to global chaos agent, Weiss argues that Putin operates in a country founded on grift: “What we think of as corruption is actually the glue that holds everything together.” Russia’s invasions of neighboring countries, notably Ukraine, are framed as part of Putin’s strategy to gird the country from perceived Western aggression, which he believes has driven seismic protests like the Arab Spring. Weiss’s enjoyable and digestible unwinding of Putin’s labyrinthine history is complemented by Brown’s wry, stripped-down comics. Readers scrambling to understand shifting global politics will appreciate this accessible takedown of a larger-than-life figure. (Nov.)