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If Michael Lewis (The New New Thing, Liar's Poker) or P.J. O'Rourke (Holidays in Hell, Parliament of Whores) had spent the 1990s in Moscow, they might have produced a book like Casino Moscow--a dizzying first-person account of the wild east and its shotgun wedding with capitalism. It begins with Matthew Brzezinski as a rookie reporter getting beaten and nearly killed by a pair of Ukrainian thugs; the rest of the book is a white-knuckle tour through a place where the line separating entrepreneurs and criminals is often impossible to discern. Brzezinski worked in the Moscow bureau of the Wall Street Journal. If his name sounds familiar, that's because he's the nephew of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor. He is an ideal guide: sometimes it takes a fish-out-of-water foreigner to see the things a jaded native cannot. (Comparing the author to Alexis de Tocqueville or Gunnar Myrdal is a stretch, but it's the same idea.) Brzezinski also writes with great humor and amazing panache. Describing the parking lot of a high-class bank, he writes that it "resembled a well-stocked Mercedes dealership that specialized only in armored, navy blue 600-series sedans, or shestotki, as the top-of-the-line models were affectionately known--as in 'My shestotka's just been blown up, can I borrow yours?'" Gangsters, prostitutes, and Western investors fill these pages, all of them coming to life courtesy of Brzezinski's narrative skill. Despite the title, Casino Moscow isn't just about Moscow--some of the best sections cover other parts of Russia: "It was heartbreaking that St. Petersburg had been so mistreated. Yet even in its state of decay, I still preferred its shabby elegance to Moscow's new-money makeover. In St. Petersburg you lived for the past; Moscow lived only for the day." At the edge of Siberia, on the Pacific coast, is Vladivostok--"five time zones ahead of the Russian capital, but a decade behind." The book is a fast-paced adventure story--and a must for readers interested in Russia as well as fans of modern-day gonzo journalism. Brzezinski is a writer to watch. --John Miller After awakening from its long communist slumber, Russia in the 1990s was a place where everything and everyone was for sale, and fortunes could be made and lost overnight. Into this free-market maelstrom stepped rookie Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski, who was immediately pulled into the mad world of Russian capitalism -- where corrupt bankers and fast-talking American carpetbaggers presided over the biggest boom and bust in financial history. Brzezinski's adventures take him from the solid-gold bathroom fixtures of Moscow's elite, to the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railway, where poverty-stricken citizens must buy water by the pail from the local crime lord, and back to civilization, to stumble into a drunken birthday bash for an ultra-nationalist politico. It's an irreverent, lurid, and hilarious account of one man's tumultuous trek through a capitalist market gone haywire -- and a nation whose uncertain future is marked by boundless hope and foreboding despair.
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