SOURCE: Scully, Matthew. “A Soviet Life.” National Review 43, no. 2 (11 February 1991): 48, 50-1.

In the following review, Scully comments that Sheehy seems overawed by Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev's celebrity status in The Man Who Changed the World, arguing that Sheehy mistakes complexity for depth of character.

The opening sentences of The Man Who Changed the World do not augur well for those wanting a sober, level-headed study of Mikhail Gorbachev: “The eyes. Everyone is struck by the gleam that blazes behind his dark eyes … as if with the intensity of his belief he had burned his image of a new world into their own retinas and they will never be quite the same.”

They're forever “gleaming with adventure,” those eyes, even as the voice remains “a steady, reassuring center in the maelstrom of events”—the sum effect being, quite simply, “dazzling” and “electrifying.” Even a reluctant George Bush finally came...