Short, Philip

Philip Short has written several definitive biographies including Mao: A Life, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, and A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand. He worked as a journalist for the BBC for 25 years as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, D.C., and wrote for the Economist and the Times of London. His Putin (Henry Holt and Co.) is the first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last 60 years. He is a dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story. Meticulously researched and drawing on almost 200 interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin gives us the whole tale.