Once in a great while a book appears which is so bold and brilliant that all other efforts in its genre seem pallid and ordinary by comparison. James H. Billington's the Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian culture... He makes a conscious effort, through the style of the book and his choice of illustrative material, to involeve the reader, to put him in the Russian scene of the time... prose is poetic and suggestive in conjuring up both a picture and the mood of a period... He der was on a variety of sources, moving with equal confidence from literature and philosophy to music, art, architecture, and even philology.