Russia's greatest love machine

One downside of cramming books on a deadline is that if I don't write the review of a book before book club, then I never want to write it at all, because I've already talked out all my thoughts. Thus, I have committed myself to informing Goodreads that I have read Amos Barshad's No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, and I should probably jot down a few thoughts so that in five years when someone asks me if I've read it and I say "Yes" and they say "What did you think?" I can look it up, but I don't really want to.

 

Part of this is also because it wasn't a hugely memorable book. Barshad's criteria for what constitutes Rasputinism works fine as a framing device but it's not really a mind-expanding bit of political theory. The book is mostly just Barshad interviewing a bunch of people whose jobs involve influencing other people, from music producers to political aides, and then going off to Moscow to have slightly surreal adventures visiting the historical Rasputin's apartment.

 

Many of the bits of the book were quite interesting or quite entertaining, even if they don't all fit together into one work very well. There's a chapter about a female newspaper reporter and a female narcotrafficker which sounds like the basis for a kickass TV show; the chapter on Tom Brady's masseuse/personal quack doctor is also pretty bananas, although there's also a Sawbones episode about him that I think is slightly stronger. The chapter on the "Rasputinism" of editors certainly provides a bit of insight into why the book is so loosely edited, as well. 

 

The strongest parts of the book were the bits about the actual historical Rasputin. The weakest bit was about Steve Bannon. I've read entirely too many profiles of Steve Bannon, and there are basically two kinds: Ones where the profiler is suckered into being impressed with Bannon's having read multiple books in his 65 years of befouling God's green earth just because he can pretentiously string a bunch of references together, and the one where that doesn't happen. Barshad, I regret to report, has fallen into the trap of describing Bannon as "crazily" well-read just because he can name-drop a handful of racist occultists. Meanwhile, yours truly here is still waiting for even one credulous journalist to show up and write a fawning profile of me as an evil genius, and I've been able to spout bollocks about bigoted old occultists since I was 15. (I could probably spout bollocks about Evola specifically these days, too, and I haven't actually read him yet.) 

 

On the other hand, I didn't realize until reading this book that the song "Ra Ra Rasputin" sounds like '70s disco because it actually is '70s disco, not a recent attempt at sounding retro, so perhaps I am too dim to talk to journalists even if they inexplicably wanted to talk to me.

 

Overall I feel this book was mostly worth my time only because of book club, which featured bacon and egg cups, apples with brie and garlic jam, and cider cocktails. Also I made scones.