A remarkable and unique insight into the character and history of the seven leaders whose careers spanned the birth and death of the Soviet Union. Unique because Volkogonov (Stalin, 1991; Trotsky, 1996) was himself a Marxist-Leninist, rose to a position where he had unparalleled access to the most secret archives, and, in part because of that access, ``after a long and tortuous inner struggle'' was able to free himself of ``the chimera of Bolshevik orthodoxy.'' He uses those archives to great effect, in the process considerably changing the judgment he rendered on Lenin in his earlier biography to emphasize those aspects of his rule which foreshadowed Stalin: his preoccupation with secrecy, his savage attacks on democracy, his total unconcern with human life, and even his readiness to give secret privileges to the party elite. Volkogonov has less that is new to say about Stalin, though he quotes the notes made by that dictator in editing his own biography to inflate his own achievements. Between 1929 and 1953, Volkogonov notes, the state deprived 21 million Russians of their lives: ``No one in history has ever waged such war on his own people.'' The archives produce some extraordinary material about his successors: letters of imprisoned security chief Beria from prison to Malenkov and the other leaders; transcripts of discussions between Khrushchev and Mao about Stalin; and the discussion in the Praesidium about the shooting down of the South Korean airliner. His judgments on them are nuanced: Khrushchev and Gorbachev courageous but unable to free themselves from Leninist orthodoxy; Brezhnev in some ways ``the good tsar'' but the prisoner of his hard-liners; Andropov talented but without new ideas; Chernenko a pathetic figure who underlined the extent to which the whole system had crumbled. A remarkable book, the autopsy of a system that killed more people than any in history, with the possible exception of its Chinese counterpart.
Pub Date: April 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83420-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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