Books about Perestroika from Amazon.com

HBO Films will present Angels in America, directed by Mike Nichols from Tony Kushner's own adaptation of his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. The remarkable cast features Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman, Patrick Wilson, James Cromwell, Michael Gambon and Simon Callow.

Angels in America is one of the most remarkable and celebrated plays of our time. Over 350,000 copies have been sold in paperback since their original publication in 1993.

Praise for the play:

"Angels in America is the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time."-Jack Kroll, Newsweek

"A vast, miraculous play . . . provocative, witty and deeply upsetting . . . a searching and radical rethinking of Ameri-can political drama."-Frank Rich, The New York Times

"Something rare, dangerous and harrowinga roman candle hurled into a drawing room . . . "-Nicholas de Jongh, London Evening Standard

"Playful and profound, extravagantly theatrical and deeply spiritual, witty, and compassionate, furious and incredibly smart . . . It's impossible to imagine anyone captivated by the beginning not wanting-needing-to go back for the end."-Linda Winer, Newsday

"An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theatre stretched to its full potential can achieve."-Clifford A. Ridley, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Perestroika is a masterpiece."-John Lahr, New Yorker

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The second half of the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Angels in America, follows the characters introduced in Millennium Approaches into the 1990s as they continue to struggle with the ravages of AIDS. Original..
Price: $2.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Soulful, theatrical, intense: Russian talk is notably full of existential musing and dark passion However, despite the widespread appreciation of Russian talk, no one has analyzed it as a form of cultural performance. As one of the first Western ethnographers to undertake fieldwork in Moscow, Nancy Ries did just that. In this pioneering study, she shows how everyday conversation shapes Russian identity and culture. Dire stories about poverty, hardship, and social decay recited constantly during perestroika served to fabricate a common worldview--conveying a sense of shared experience and destiny, and casting Russian society as an inescapable realm of absurdity and suffering. Ries agues that while these narratives aptly depicted the chaotic events of the time, they also comprised a kind of contemporary folklore, generic in their lamenting, portentous tones and their culturally poignant details. The story of a grandmother who stands in line all day in order to bring home a precious kilo of sugar becomes a parable of feminine self-sacrifice and endurance. Sardonic narratives about frustrated communal apartment dwellers pouring hot pepper in their neighbor's soup pot challenge the myth of camaraderie and express the proverbial notion that revenge is sweeter for Russians than reconciliation. This insightful ethnography suggests the enormous power that ordinary talk has, in any society, to shape social and political attitudes, and to produce distinctive cultural patterns..
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