Riot days

RED FAMINE: Stalin's War on Ukraine, by Anne Applebaum. (Doubleday, $35.) In this richly detailed account of the 20th-century Soviet republic's great famine, the author shines a light on Stalinist crimes that still resonate today in the ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine. THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN, by Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Ekin Oklap. (Knopf, $27.95.) In his latest novel, Pamuk traces the disastrous effects of a Turkish teenager's brief encounter with a married actress, elaborating on his fiction's familiar themes: the tensions between East and West, traditional habits and modern life, the secular and the sacred. THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $28.) Gessen, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, tells the story of modern Russia through the eyes of seven individuals who found that politics was a force none of them could escape. RIOT DAYS, by Maria Alyokhina. (Metropolitan, paper, $17.) This fragmentary prison memoir by a member of Pussy Riot combines dark humor and protest as it describes the author's 18 months inside a Russian prison. Alyokhina shows that refusal to submit to injustice can be enough to reactivate the rule of law. THE MEANING OF BELIEF: Religion From an Atheist's Point of View, by Tim Crane. (Harvard University, $24.95.) This lucid and thoughtful examination by an atheist philosopher resists the notion that religion is simply bad science amplified by arbitrary injunctions. Unlike the more combative atheists who caricature belief, Crane strives to offer a more accurate picture of religion to his fellow unbelievers. THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY, by Cherise Wolas. (Flatiron Books, $27.99.) The eponymous heroine of this ambitious debut novel starts a novel in secret, after setting aside a promising writing career to raise a family. FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS, by Mihail Sebastian. Translated by Philip 0 Ceallaigh. (Other Press, paper, $16.95.) This classic Romanian novel, originally published in 1934, centers on the anti-Semitism that flourished just before the country's turn to fascism, pitting the local against the global. LENIN: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, by Victor Sebestyen. (Pantheon, $35.) Sebestyen has managed to produce a first-rate thriller by detailing the cynicism and murderous ambition of the founder of the Soviet Union. STALIN: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, by Stephen Kotkin. (Penguin Press, $40.) This second volume of a projected three-volume life assiduously delves into Stalin's personal life even as it places him within the trajectory of Soviet history. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

The inside story of the Russian rock revolutionaries and the trial and prison ordeals that followed their arrest.Alyokhina is no more a writer than she is a musician or an "official enemy of the people" of Russia, as she was charged under the Putin administration. She is an artist (whose drawings underscore the droll humor of her perspective), a mother, and, more recently, the recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace and the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. The slapdash breeziness of this memoir shows the absurdity of Pussy Riot's imprisonment for subversively performing a protest song in a church. The news of their arrest and the seriousness of the response to what was labeled a "criminal conspiracy" made their action all the more effective and gave it longer-lasting impact. Their first protest was, if anything, more outrageous, as they gave an impromptu performance of "Putin Peed His Pants" in Red Square while setting fire to "a poster of Putin kissing Qaddafi." "The cops got us afterwards for trespassing," she writes. "We told them we were drama students." Their next performance had more serious consequences, as they performed inside a church, shooting a video that they would post on the internet of a performance of a song with the lyric, "Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Be a feminist! Be a feminist!" They escaped from the church, but once the video went viral, the search intensified as the band mates conducted interviews by cellphone from coffee shops or wherever else they stopped while on the run. However, they refused to leave Russia because "revolution is a story. If we fell out of it, disappeared, it would be their story, not ours." Here, the author reclaims and extends that story, showing how one woman's refusal to stop agitating, even while incarcerated, gave the Russian government a lot more trouble than it had anticipated. An inspirational memoir about youthful idealism and the power of popular culture to challenge the status quo. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.