STALIN'S ARCHITECT Power and Survival in Moscow

Derek Perkins is a favored narrator for serious nonfiction, and rightly so. Expressive but unintrusive, his voice is familiar on first hearing it yet still fresh after 500 performances. Here he narrates the first full biography of Boris Iofan, state architect under Stalin, whose career exemplifies the uneasy relationship between architecture and power. The narrative is an example of the type at which Perkins excels: well researched, vividly detailed, built on a series of striking dramatic sequences. These include pogroms in czarist Odessa, where Iofan, who was Jewish, grew up; the confusion in Moscow after the German invasion in 1940; and Iofan's ingenuity at camouflaging the city's distinctive skyline against German bombers. Iofan survived Stalin, but his plans for a grandiose "Palace of the Soviets" died with the dictator. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2023]