This investigation of the presence of Vladimir Putin or, rather, versions of his public image in America's cultural consciousness as well as the nation's marketplace was inspired by a casual conversation between the author and a colleague. The book's breezy style seems to reflect its provenance. Alison Rowley's declared purpose, however, is a serious one: “By looking at material objects—the kitsch in my title—I will trace the satirical uses of Putin's persona, particularly how he serves as a foil for other world leaders” (3). In fact, Putin Kitsch in America is much more than a study of political satire and its real-life outcomes. It offers an often perceptive commentary on the quality and dynamics of American political discourse, over which the figure of Russia's second and fourth president has come to cast a long and crooked shadow.

The public figures discussed in this book—Putin preeminently, as well as, in order of prominence, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin—are treated not as political or ideological actors, but objects of visual, material, and narrative interpretation and commercialization, mostly carried out via the internet. These processes, the author stresses, are shaped by America's bitterly partisan, identitarian politics, which formatted Putin as the hyper-masculine master, patron, or antagonist of the four US politicians listed above. The material items Rowley looks at include Putin-themed finger puppets, coloring books, women's bathing suits, garden gnomes, magnetic play sets, and Ritz crackers, all of them sold online. She also discusses, at considerable length, RPS or “real people slash” (108), a type of political fan (or hate) fiction that shows same-sex characters engaging in romance or sex. American manifestations of Putin, she notes, are distinguished by the “extreme sexualization” (12) of the Russian leader, though she avoids delving into the national psyche for the underlying causes of this phenomenon. Instead, Rowley observes that most studies of Putin's “leadership cult” (4) confine themselves to examining Russian political spaces, whereas her aim is to focus on America's reception and conceptualization of the man in the Kremlin. To frame her analysis, she provides a brief account of Russia's turbulent 1990s and Putin's life and career prior to his election as president. Unlike the personality cults of former Russian rulers, Putin's political rep or street cred does not rely on traditional (Nicholas II) or coercive (Joseph Stalin) instruments of authority. Indeed, writes Rowley, “much Putin kitsch amuses as it comments on politics” (12), with the entertainment value in question appreciated in both Russia and the United States.

Rowley defines the Gary Hart-Donna Rice sex scandal of 1987 as “a kind of ground zero” (25) for a new media confluence of “posturing and gamesmanship [in] contemporary political life” (29), with a concomitant reliance on satire and pastiche disseminated via TV comedy and chat shows such as The Colbert Report. The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the emergence of postmodern irony, a discursive posture shared by entertainers and voters alike. At the same time, foreign policy in the United States “was often literally reduced to a contest between two men whose bodies served as proxies for their nations’ respective political and economic systems” (35), a practice that catalyzed Putin's body-centric prominence in the eyes of American observers and fans. The famous 2007 sequence of photographs showing a bare-chested Putin fishing in the Republic of Tuva was a turning point, when “Putin kitsch…burst onto the scene in the United States” (41). Rowley points out that as a PR trope, Putin's Shirtless in Siberia photo op was not unique: decades earlier Benito Mussolini had willingly displayed his unclothed torso to the cameras as a means of imprinting an image of vigorous, hairy-chested masculinity on the minds of his followers. (The same, one might add, was true of JFK.) There follows an interesting excursus devoted to the historical evolution of the T-shirt. From a hidden-from-view item of male underwear it became transformed into visible-to-all platform for cultural communication. In the twenty-first century, Putin's bare chest decorates thousands of American chests.

Next, Rowley looks at the manner in which “wickedly sexualized satires” were used in the United States to demasculinize President Trump, with Putin serving as his “perfect political counterpart” with “alpha-male credentials” (77). Anti-Trump vilifications often take the form of fake fiction, that is, self-published, commercially distributed pornographic novels and stories that contain “only a smattering of truthful detail…because the authors are more concerned with getting their political point across” (88). But even before Trump entered presidential politics, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton had already found themselves reconfigured online as Putin's fictional, sexual playthings. Perhaps more could have been said about the routine misogyny reflected in these partisan pornographic attacks from the left and right.

Online “real people slash” featuring American politicians is the work of ideological graphomaniacs or political obsessives. Rowley is careful to note that while these narratives feature “explicit sex and a whole host of fetishes,” they “are not really meant to arouse” (109). The fetishes in question include Putin's pectoral muscles as originally featured in those Siberian photos. From the copious quotations in Rowley's book, the conclusion offers that these slash narratives possess no literary merit. Verbal and photographic memes about the Russian president abound in the digitized ether, with “Putin on the Ritz” named the #1 Worst Visual Pun of All Time by the Huffington Post (138). Rowley goes on to catalogue his connection to the “gaming revolution” (148) but concedes that “there is no evidence that any of these [Putin-themed] games are widely played” (153).

There are very few inaccuracies of fact or interpretation in this well-researched if fairly slim volume. One ought to acknowledge, however, that while “handlers” (7) such as Vladislav Surkov, former deputy head of the Presidential Administration, did much to create the aura of tough-guy masculinity around Putin, as his career at the top unfolded Russia's national leader turned out to be, perhaps to his own surprise, a genuinely charismatic figure.