In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision—what to do with such knowledge—Gessen explored the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers. 
Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Gessen, Masha

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

A gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius 
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In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture, an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century. A prize of one million dollars was offered to anyone who could unravel it, but Perelman declined the winnings, and in doing so inspired journalist Masha Gessen to tell his story. Drawing on interviews with Perelmanâ€™s teachers, classmates, coaches, teammates, and colleagues in Russia and the United Statesâ€”and informed by her own background as a math whiz raised in Russiaâ€”Gessen uncovered a mind of unrivaled computational power, one that enabled Perelman to pursue mathematical concepts to their logical (sometimes distant) end. But she also discovered that this very strength turned out to be Perelman's undoing and the reason for his withdrawal, first from the world of mathematics and then, increasingly, from the world in general.

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Masha Gessen discovered through genetic testing that she had the dreaded BRCA1 genetic mutation--the same mutation made famous recently by Angelina Jolie, which predisposes women to ovarian and breast cancer. As Gessen wrestled with a wrenching personal decision—what to do with such knowledge—she explored the landscape of a brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers.Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

Blood Matters: From BRCA1 to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Mariner Books

In the 1930s, as waves of war and persecution were crashing over Europe, two young Jewish women began separate journeys of survival. One, a Polish-born woman from Bialystok, where virtually the entire Jewish community would soon be sent to the ghetto and from there to Hitler’s concentration camps, was determined not only to live but to live with pride and defiance. The other, a Russian-born intellectual and introvert, would eventually become a high-level censor under Stalin’s regime. At war’s end, both women found themselves in Moscow, where informers lurked on every corner and anti-Semitism reigned. It was there that Ester and Ruzya would first cross paths, there that they became the closest of friends and learned to trust each other with their lives. In this deeply moving family memoir, journalist Masha Gessen tells the story of her two beloved grandmothers: Ester, the quicksilver rebel who continually battled the forces of tyranny; Ruzya, a single mother who joined the Communist Party under duress and made the compromises the regime exacted of all its citizens. Both lost their first loves in the war. Both suffered unhappy unions. Both were gifted linguists who made their living as translators. And both had children—Ester a boy, and Ruzya a girl—who would grow up, fall in love, and have two children of their own: Masha and her younger brother. With grace, candor, and meticulous research, Gessen peels back the layers of secrecy surrounding her grandmothers’ lives. As she follows them through this remarkable period in history—from the Stalin purges to the Holocaust, from the rise of Zionism to the fall of communism—she describes how each of her grandmothers, and before them her great-grandfather, tried to navigate a dangerous line between conscience and compromise. Ester and Ruzya is a spellbinding work of storytelling, filled with political intrigue and passionate emotion, acts of courage and acts of betrayal. At once an intimate family chronicle and a fascinating historical tale, it interweaves the stories of two women with a brilliant vision of Russian history. The result is a memoir that reads like a novel—and an extraordinary testament to the bonds of family and the power of hope, love, and endurance.

Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace

Community & Culture

The Dial Press

In this “extraordinary family memoir,”* the National Book Award–winning author of The Future Is History reveals the story of her two grandmothers, who defied Fascism and Communism during a time when tyranny reigned. *The New York Times Book Review In the 1930s, as waves of war and persecution were crashing over Europe, two young Jewish women began separate journeys of survival. Ester Goldberg was a rebel from Bialystok, Poland, where virtually the entire Jewish community would be sent to Hitler’s concentration camps. Ruzya Solodovnik was a Russian-born intellectual who would become a high-level censor under Stalin’s regime. At war’s end, both women found themselves in Moscow. Over the years each woman had to find her way in a country that aimed to make every citizen a cog in the wheel of murder and repression. One became a hero in her children’s and grandchildren’s eyes; the other became a collaborator. With grace, candor, and meticulous research, Masha Gessen, one of the most trenchant observers of Russia and its history today, peels back the layers of time to reveal her grandmothers’ lives—and to show that neither story is quite what it seems. Praise for Masha Gessen “One of the most important activists and journalists Russia has known in a generation.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker “Masha Gessen is humbly erudite, deftly unconventional, and courageously honest.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

Random House Publishing Group

"When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen."&nbsp;--The New York Times "A&nbsp;reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact."&nbsp;--Interview As seen on MSNBC's&nbsp;Morning Joe and heard on NPR's All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist offers an&nbsp;essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides&nbsp;an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility.&nbsp;Surviving Autocracy&nbsp;is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery--and to the hope of what comes next.

Surviving Autocracy

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Riverhead Books

Riverhead (Hc)

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times\n“A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview\nAs seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.\nThis incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

Random House, Large Print

Product Description 
“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times\n“A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview\nAs seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times.\nThis incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. 
Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next. 
 Review 
Praise for Surviving Autocracy: 
“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” — 
The New York Times“The Platonic ideal of the anti-Trump Trump book. . . . Offers discomfort and reassurance at once.” — 
The Washington Post\n“An indispensable voice of and for this moment.” — 
Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny\n“Urgent . . . Gessen’s credentials as an observer of autocracy are impeccable. . . . 
Surviving Autocracy sharpens an edge of disgust lately blunted by relentless use.” — 
The New York Review of Books\n“The fearless Russian American journalist probes the black hole between fact and fantasy in [a] taut, incisive critique.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine\n“Gessen brings . . . a unique blend of intellect and manifold passions. . . [flashing] the fierce attitude and language of the partisan activist in one moment, returning to the cooler mien of a public intellectual the next.” 
—NPR 
“Brilliant. . . . [Gessen's] clarity is gemlike and refusal to equivocate precious.” — 
The Guardian 
(London)\n“A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” 
—Interview\n“Gessen’s decades-long experience covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia puts them in a unique position to help Americans understand what is happening to the United States under President Donald Trump. . . . Gessen shows us that having the language to understand what is happening is the first step to surviving, and ultimately resisting, an autocratic future.” — 
The Nation\n“It’s hard to imagine someone more poised to write a book called 
Surviving Autocracy than Masha Gessen. . . . It’s a crucial book for our times.” — 
The New York Observer\n“Unfailingly polemical, precise and analytic.” — 
New Statesman (London)\n“A stark wake-up call; to those who are looking for what happens now, Gessen’s notes on how we need to rebuild the concept of a ‘we’ in our time are warm and moving, a light of hope that these years can be survived.” — 
Lit Hub\n“A blistering appraisal. . . . 
Surviving Autocracy isn’t merely important reading for anyone who plans to cast a vote in that election, it’s essential.” 
 —Shelf Awareness\n“A brisk, trenchant account . . . . Gessen’s meticulous research and familiarity with the political and cultural history of post-Soviet Russia lend her arguments an authority lacking in other takedowns of Trump. Liberals looking to make sense of what they’re up against in the 2020 elections should consider this a must-read.” — 
Publishers Weekly (starred review)\n“A handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed. .

Penguin Publishing Group

Journalist Masha Gessen's last memory of Russia was the crowd of red-eyed relatives gathered at the airport in Moscow in 1981 to wave goodbye forever to her 14-year-old self, her brother and her parents. Unwilling to have their children grow up bearing the weight of the same anti-Semitism that they and their parents had, Masha's mother and father were emigrating to America. But Russia was Masha's home and 10 years later she returned to a changed country, and to her two grandmothers. With intelligence and humour Masha Gessen unfolds the tale of these two women: both Eastern European Jews who lived through Polish and Russian anti-Semitism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Stalin years and who bore unceasing intimidation and fear in very different ways but with similar courage, resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah. As Masha traces the characters, struggles, love affairs and families of Ester, confident and reckless, and Rosalia, sensitive and responsible, the story of twentieth-century Russia and its people, the Jews, their friends and their enemies, emerges. And so does Masha Gessen's own story, itself a modern myth of exile and return.

Two Babushkas: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (*SIGNED 1st Edition)

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Books by Gessen, Masha

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gessen, Masha. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century

Blood Matters: From BRCA1 to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene

Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace

Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace

Surviving Autocracy

Surviving Autocracy

Surviving Autocracy

Surviving Autocracy

Two Babushkas: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace (*SIGNED 1st Edition)