SOURCE: Scheer, Robert. “How the Other Half Lives.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (16 December 1990): 1, 11.

In the following review, Scheer criticizes The Man Who Changed the World, finding fault with the “full-throated arrogance” of the work.

Mikhail Gorbachev arguably has changed the world more dramatically and with less bloodshed then any leader since Christ, and he certainly deserves something better than Gail Sheehy as a biographer. Hers is a pop-psychology genre of journalism in which the journalist's own odyssey becomes the dominant subject and the historically important figure is reduced to reader bait for the purpose of sales.

The full-throated arrogance of this paltry effort [The Man Who Changed the World] is summarized by Sheehy's boast that “this book is an X-ray of history—some of which I witnessed up close.” This from a writer with no knowledge of local languages, barely aware of regional history and who, after...