Books by Togzhan Kassenova
“When things started going wrong in Kazakhstan earlier this year, I started dipping into a few books about it and found its history fascinating. The vast, wide-open steppe made it a place of herders for millennia, but during the Soviet era it was also a convenient location for deporting entire populations, locating gulags, and carrying out nuclear testing, which is what Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb focuses on. It’s by Togzhan Kassenova, a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the United States, but also a Kazakh. She writes of her ‘immense gratitude for the privilege of telling the story of my land and its people.’ It’s scholarly and yet touching. Also, as many world powers seem to be heading closer to war rather than away from it, it’s perhaps hopeful that in the not-too-distant past a country that had more than 1,000 nuclear weapons when it became independent ended up nuclear-free.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early 2022
Sophie Roell, Journalist
Interviews where books by Togzhan Kassenova were recommended
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1
The Last Emperor of Mexico
by Edward Shawcross -
2
Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books
by Geoffrey Roberts -
3
Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb
by Togzhan Kassenova -
4
This Mortal Coil: A History of Death
by Andrew Doig -
5
The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Notable Nonfiction of Early 2022, recommended by Sophie Roell
Notable Nonfiction of Early 2022, recommended by Sophie Roell
Even though we’re still in the first couple of months of 2022, there are already lots of really interesting nonfiction books either out or just about to be published. Five Books editor Sophie Roell surveys the flood of books that cover everything from Neolithic archaeology to the latest insights of neuroscience and genetics, as well as books that explore where we work, what we feel, and how we die.
