a memoir
A01=Michael Idov
Author_Michael Idov
books about putin
books about russian
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DNC
Category=KNTP2
Category=NL-BM
Category=NL-KN
Category=NL-WT
Category=WTL
COP=United States
current events
Discount=15
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_travel
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
HMM=208
IMPN=Farrar
ISBN13=9780374538163
journalism
journalism autobiography
journalist autobiography
journalist memoir
Language_English
living in russia
PA=Available
PD=20190212
POP=New York
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
PUB=Farrar
reporter autobiography
reporter memoir
russia
russian books
russian media
SMM=18
Straus & Giroux Inc
Subject=Industry & Industrial Studies
Subject=Memoirs
Subject=Travel & Holiday
vladimir putin
WG=352
WMM=141
writer autobiography
writer memoir
Product details
- ISBN 9780374538163
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 353g
- Dimensions: 143 x 214 x 18mm
- Publication Date: 01 Mar 2019
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: New York, US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside - and closely observing - the media and cultural elite of Putin’s Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia’s top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite - until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind.
In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humour and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.
Michael Idov is an award-winning journalist, a screenwriter, and the author of the novel Ground Up (FSG, 2009). From 2006 to 2012, he was a contributing editor at New York magazine and won three National Magazine Awards for his writing; he edited GQ Russia from 2012 to 2014. Born in 1976 in Riga, Latvia, Idov moved to the United States in 1992 and currently lives in Berlin.
