At the Village Voice, authors pick their favorite obscure books.

Salon is running a review by Alexander Nazaryan of A Russian Diary, the posthumously published record of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Anyone curious about why Russia’s post-Soviet flirtation with democracy has been such an erratic affair will find [the book] an indispensable tome. A reporter for Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper), one of Russia’s last organs of liberal media, Politkovskaya gained prominence–and notoriety–by chronicling the gradual depredation of civil liberties that began when Putin took power in 1999 and reopened the Chechen conflict that his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had waged to keep the small mountain region from gaining autonomy.

Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment last fall with several point-blank shots that, as any Russian knows, signal a contract killing.