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The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia Paperback – March 27, 2000

by Mark Ames (Author), Matt Taibbi (Author), Edward Limonov (Author)
3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 33 ratings
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The eXile is the controversial biweekly tabloid founded by Americans Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi that Rolling Stone has called "cruel, caustic, and funny" and "a must-read." In the tradition of gonzo journalists like Hunter S. Thompson, Ames and Taibbi cover everything from decadent club scenes to the nation's collapsing political and economic systems - no person or institution is spared from their razor sharp satiric viewpoint. They take you beneath the surface of the Russia that most Western journalists cover, bringing to life the metropolis that Ames describes as "manic, nihilistic, grotesque, horrible; and yet, in its own way, far superior to any city on Earth." Featuring artwork and articles from their groundbreaking newspaper, The eXile is the inside story of how the tabloid came to be and how Ames and Taibbi broke their biggest stories - all the while playing hysterically vicious practical jokes, racking up innumerable death threats, and ingesting a motherlode of speed. It's a darkly funny, up-close profile of the sordid underbelly of the New World Order that you will never forget.
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  1. Print length
    256 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Grove Press
  4. Publication date
    March 27, 2000
  5. Dimensions
    8.5 x 1 x 11 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0802136524
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0802136527
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect." The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.) Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate mindset. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Full of drugs, sex, and booze, this book initially strikes one as an ode to bad taste. The authors, editors of the English-language Moscow tabloid newspaper The eXile, know this: "we stood for all the wrong things--but at least we weren't bores." True enough. Still, Chapter 3 has good reporting on USAID, the World Bank/IMF, and the Investor Protection Fund and how they waste money and benefit the Russian rich. Similarly, Chapter 8 contains news items (e.g., former Yeltsin adviser Anatoly Chubais's "loans-for-shares" auctions) incorrectly analyzed in the Moscow press, along with the correct analysis by the editors of The eXile. The authors also describe The eXile's first year, 1997, which one editor saw as his "first experience...with taking life seriously." Like most coming-of-age stories, this is bittersweet. Recommended for academic libraries collecting in Russian studies or journalism.
---Bert Beynen, Des Moines Area Community Coll. Lib., IA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; First Edition (March 27, 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802136524
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802136527
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.37 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 1 x 11 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 33 ratings

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Mark Ames

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Customer reviews

3.5 out of 5 stars
33 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Lewis Ford
5.0 out of 5 stars The eXile -
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2011
Verified Purchase
the eXile is a "must read" - written by brave people who present themselves as people you'd love to hate. It is a story that is exciting as any novel and as an historical account it illustrates in graphical detail the early gold rush years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Set in Moscow, it describes the birth and maturation of a remarkable journal - one that told unpalatable truths in the face of real danger from those in power, most of whom were (and remain) beyond the law. Taibbi and Ames provoke extreme reactions and were often betrayed by the petty jealousies of other journalists who cared more for their salary checks than telling the true stories behind post-Soviet Russia's development. To understand contemporary events such as the cult of Putin, or the Abramovich / Berezovsky spat, you really ought to read the eXile and know that what they tell you really did happen and, what's most disturbing, continues to happen now in much the same way as it did then.

the eXile is also a laugh; it really is funny - it has the humourous appeal of a very bad disaster movie. It sticks up two fingers to the dire politically-correct hypocrisy of those ignorant of street life in post Soviet cities. the eXile made us howl with laughter and choke with shock.

It's not nice reading. It's often in bad taste, but it is an excellent book.
5 people found this helpful
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Howard Skillington
4.0 out of 5 stars Taibbi's misspent youth revealed!
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2014
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If, like me, your awareness of Matt Taibbi began post Goldman Sachs Vampire Squid, then you may wonder about his not-infrequent allusions to the drug use and dissolute ways of his misspent youth. Given Taibbi’s brilliance as one of today’s most insightful and entertaining writers about banksters and criminal financiers, I have suspected that there was more to those early years than sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and this book contains the key.
To get to it requires making it through, or more likely past, the “contributions” written by Taibbi’s nominal co-author, Mark Ames. Ames is surely one of the most repellent human beings I have ever encountered on the printed page. He threatens to have his girlfriend killed because she refuses to get an abortion, dismisses the entire Czech Republic and its people because they don’t suit his style, and writes redundantly and at length about how “drugs are fun.” If Matt’s young adulthood was indeed misspent it was most likely due to his unprofitable friendship with Ames.
But if you take my advice and simply skip Ames’ chapters, this book offers two substantial rewards. Taibbi’s accounts of all manner of improbable ventures and misadventures, including playing professional basketball in Mongolia and getting beaten up in a Moscow nightclub restroom are highly entertaining, but they sneak up on the real point of Taibbi’s years in Russia and, indeed, this book. The Western expats who occupied Moscow during the late nineties, principally Americans, were every bit as grasping and loathsome as Moscow’s would-be oligarchs, enabling Russia’s worst people to take control of its economy - often with U.S. taxpayer dollars. That fellow expats would presume to influence another country in such a corrosive way pissed off the Russophilic Ames and Taibbi so much that they created The eXile as a subversive instrument to harass and damage them as much as possible.
The results of the eXile’s mission ranged from cringeworthy pratfalls to brilliantly executed pranks that did some significant damage to people who surely deserved the worst. Chief among the eXile’s targets was one Michael Bass who, while still pulling eXile quills out of his backside, gave this book a five star rating here on Amazon. The odious Ames precludes a fifth star but if you are a Taibbi fan, are curious about what really happened to Russia between Gorbachev and Putin, and would like greater insight into the actual effect of American “foreign aid,” then I recommend this book.
11 people found this helpful
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jennifer12
1.0 out of 5 stars Self-Indulgent, Less than Superficial, Hopelessly Outdated, and Irrelevant
Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2013
Verified Purchase
The book descriptions and supporting blurb are woefully misleading.

You will also note that "95% of the reviews for this "book" here on Amazon are dated circa year 2000.

In 2013 - this book is hopelessly out of date both in the topics it covers and in its social commentary, and expatriate interaction commentaries. Even at the time, e.g. 2000, its appeal must have been very limited.

All that this book is, despite claims to the contrary, is just a compilation of articles from "Exile" magazine inter-woven with supporting commentary background about the articles from the authors.

The standard of content is very much what would now be seen as over the top, deliberately provocative, politically incorrect, blogging. Self-indulgent for sure; superficial to match. To attach any value to this, other than generating the occasional rye laugh or smile, is an exercise is wishful thinking. Not least as almost all the content is focussed on the personal interactions of the authors with the cast of uninteresting and unamusing, infantile, but self-obsessed, characters that populate the expat community in Russia (= in essence, Moscow) in the 1990s.

Even in 2000 - it would have been the sort of book that you'd give a certain type of person for Xmas. Quick read; then throw away or then give away.

That this should be being pushed for sale in 2013 is bizarre as well as disgraceful exploitation.

Count me in as a sucker for buying it.
26 people found this helpful
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ben
5.0 out of 5 stars living in moscow
Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2013
matt taibbi is a god among writers and this book shows his burst from the eggshell.

"...the (Moscow) expat loses all sense of proportion; his moral rudder is swinging wildly. He's never sailed in these seas, and even as he's about to capsize in a storm of bad decisions, he's convinced that he's the most clever, cunning little cracker that Eurasia has ever seen. It's the arrogance of a colonialist. That's what makes him so reckless and idiotic: that mixture of undeserved hubris, inexperience, and neophyte evil, projected through the average mind of the average expat."

taibbi's chapters are full of sentences like this. raw and descriptive. he writes like a burning coal.
i'm so happy to finally get this book. it is a must-read for any taibbi fan and beyond...

meanwhile, mark ames is a douche.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Blondie
5.0 out of 5 stars A trip down memory lane
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2015
Verified Purchase
Negative points: Ames is just over the top as far as women are concerned, to the point where I recoiled.
Ames spent far too much time in describing his drug experiences - of no interest to someone who is not a drugtaker. It was way too self-absorbed.
Good points: To someone who lived there from 1998 to 2007, I loved reading about the 97/98 period and reliving the thrills of that amazing time. I'm besotted with Moscow and Muscovites (okay - all Russians too), so seeing that Ames/Taibbi also shared the love was rewarding. Sometimes its difficult to describe to Western friends just why Moscow is so captivating. I empathise with their anti-beigist philosophy and mourned the corporate takeover of Moscow while watching Russian 'innocence' in terms of capitalism melt away day by day, and how consumerism started to take over. I mourned the banners advertising mortgages hung across the prospekts when they first arrived.
We too considered moving further east when getting around Sheremetyevo started to become 'user-friendly' round about 2002, the challenge of surviving was getting too easy.
It was interesting reading about the aid community from a distance of 17 years. Could I say this is a valuable historical document?
I would have liked more of the same but covering the years 1999 - 2010. Any chance of that?

Ames/Taibbi said they produced a paper for people like themselves: "paranoid depressives with very twisted enthusiasms". I can't call myself anything like that, but when the Exile was in print, I always made a point of finding a copy. It was a bitter sweet experience, good writing, something to make you laugh, something to make you recoil. It was hard to believe that it was allowed to see the light of day, but as the authors have said, no one Russian was busy reading it.
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Nate Drezzz
3.0 out of 5 stars Self-Indulgent, But Okay
Reviewed in Canada on November 29, 2013
Verified Purchase
The two young cast-aways who started the Exile and then ran it into the ground have written a vivid piece of self-glorifying propaganda here, tooting their own horns about how wonderfully clever and, well, amazing they are. I lived and worked in Moscow for many years and the way these two guys write about Russians, as if though they were some collective mass with no head or tail, is insulting to Russians. I have no difficulty in understanding why the Exile went under and then was shut down by the authorities.

On the flip side, this book is entertaining and funny, and the depictions of the various Americans and Brits who flock to Moscow to "find themselves" is deadly accurate. These guys know how to tear a strip off someone who crosses them, for better or worse.
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